
Class "T'S ^^^1, 
Book J\._L_ 



Copyright N". 



COFVRICHT DEPOSIT. 



SOME LETTERS OF 

IS^tlUam laaugi^n jwootit 




^f^CJ^^,,^^ iyc^.^^Ji^ yi^ .^-^^-U^ 



I869-I9IO 



/' 



SOME LETTERS 

OF 

3^tlliam "^augfjn JHooti? 

EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION 

BY 

DANIEL GREGORY MASON 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

(3Ct)e Vii'ozv^itit pxt9^ Cambriboe 

1913 



I «^ A> -i 



J^ 



COPYRIGHT, I913, BY DANIEL GREGORY MASON 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October 1Q13 



'^CI.A357158 



INTRODUCTION 

"He liberates the imagination with his prose," 
wrote one of Moody's friends when the project of col- 
lecting some of the letters was being discussed, "as 
effectively as he does with his poetry. And then besides 
there is the luminous personality which emerges from 
every folded sheet, looking out with large veiled eyes." 
The comment happily describes the double interest of 
these letters. They are, first of all, literature, and may 
be read, by those who know nothing of the personality 
of their author, for their purely literary charm, their 
power to "liberate the imagination." They carry, like 
his poetry, for such a reader, their own rich gifts 
of delight; they are as magnanimously conceived, as 
hauntingly phrased, as eloquently and ingeniously 
clothed in metaphor, even more mischievously touched 
with humor. Moody's poetry is destined, surely, to a 
high, if not to the supreme, place in the American 
poetry of his generation. His letters, it seems to me, 
are worthy to stand beside it; and there, so far as their 
purely literary quality is concerned, they may be left 
without further comment. 

But like all good letters they are not only literature 
but self-revelation; and the clear vision of this more 
individual element may be helped not only by the 
large illumination shed upon them from the poetry, 
but by the countless casual side-lights that only per- 

V 



INTRODUCTION 

sonal acquaintance can note and interpret. The two 
or three essential quaHties of Moody's mind were 
singularly persistent and ubiquitous, and like the few 
geologic strata that may underlie the most varied 
landscape, cropped out in his careless talk as unmis- 
takably as in his poems or letters. His spiritual earn- 
estness, for example, made him as indifferent to the 
merely conventional aspects of life as he was passion- 
ately curious about its essential structure. In his 
poetry he avoided superficial detail, to penetrate at 
once to essences. In his letters he often exasperatingly 
withheld the petty facts of which most correspondence 
consists, but was always frank and full in the reve- 
lation of mood. Similarly in everyday intercourse he 
combined intellectual candor and personal reserve in a 
way that many found bewildering. For his friends the 
paradox was symbolised in his eyes. In their liquidness 
and transparence, in their steadfastness and quietude, 
they seemed to open up quite fearlessly a way to his 
deepest thoughts. Beautiful serene eyes they were, 
telling all that mattered but ignoring the trivial and 
the irrelevant: it was as if he had both the honesty 
and the shyness of a child. This is perhaps what 
his friend means when he speaks of his personality 
"emerging from every folded sheet, with large veiled 
eyes." 

Akin to the serenity of his gaze, and like it a little 
embarrassing on first acquaintance but endlessly re- 
freshing to riper friendship, was his constitutional 
taciturnity. It used to be said of him in college that 

vi 



INTRODUCTION 

''It took Moody a pipeful to make a remark" — and 
the discerning added that it was worth while to wait. 
When I first met him, in the spring of 1894, during his 
instructorship in the English Department at Harvard, 
his manner was shy and somewhat self-consciously 
awkward, so that we undergraduates of a complacent 
local clique found it easy to dismiss him as "Western.'* 
An odd blend of floridity and negligence about him 
ofi^ended those whose ideal of manliness was a correct 
dandyism. And in his physical being there was indeed 
a sort of rough homeliness that made the epithet to a 
certain extent descriptive. But it did not take long to 
pass that stage, to find that he had also the freshness 
and magnanimity of the West, and that he saw things 
under wider horizons than those of the Cambridge 
tea-tables. Above all, one discovered the richness of 
his silences. He had a way of slightly knitting his 
brows, as if taking, from under half-closed lids, a bird's- 
eye view of the broadest possible stretch of his subject, 
while he communed with his pipe, frequently pressing 
down the tobacco with a forefinger long inured to that 
service, and finally producing a brief comment, usually 
metaphorical and often madly exaggerative, that lib- 
erated the mind more than floods of ordinary talk. It 
was as if, instead of dissipating the thought supply as 
most talkers do, churning it up into a froth that gives 
only an illusion of increased substance, he was engaged 
in a quiet husbanding of truth, whereby it rose to 
higher levels in the reservoir. He gave one always a 
sense of increased insight, of renewed confidence, of 

vii 



INTRODUCTION 

a deeper and truer conspectus of things than that of 
everyday observation. 

The liberating effect of his talk must have been due 
in no small degree to its vividly figurative quality. No 
matter to what extent one might have been led to 
expect this by the luxuriance of figure characteristic of 
his poetry, one could not but be struck afresh on each 
occasion, by the surprising variety, the ingenious com- 
plexity, and often the droll incongruity, of the meta- 
phors that he would constantly strike out in the heat 
of conversation, mould with loving care for a moment, 
and then toss aside. The letters, too, it will be found, 
owe much of their individuality of flavor to a use of 
figure at once whimsical and persistently logical. Who 
but Moody would have thought of comparing himself 
to a bicycle in such elaborate detail as this : "Good fun, 
but rather hard on one's tire. I hasten to assure you 
that I am as yet unpunctured, though much worn at 
the rim, and rapidly losing resiliency by leakage. I 
relinquish the figure with reluctance." On another 
occasion, trying to solace a friend incapacitated for 
work, he lets himself be beguiled into some charming 
variations on the old theme, "The dark cellar ripens 
the wine." "And meanwhile," he says, "after one's 
eyes get used to the dirty light, and one's feet to the 
mildew, a cellar has its compensations. I have found 
beetles of the most interesting proclivities, mice alto- 
gether comradely and persuadable, and forgotten 
potatoes that sprouted toward the crack of sunshine 
with a wan maiden grace not seen above." But the 

viii 



INTRODUCTION 

most irresistible instance, in all the letters, of this 
peculiarly Moody-esque pursuit, with meticulous logic, 
of a more or less absurd metaphor, occurs in a letter to 
Mrs. Toy in which he hits off once for all that contrast 
between East and West which was always haunting 
him. " I am eager," he writes, "for the queer inimitable 
charm of Cambridge, for that atmosphere of mind at 
once so impersonal and so warm, for that neatness and 
decency of you children, who have been washed and 
dressed and sent to play on the front lawn of time by 
old auntie Ding-an-sich, while we hoodlums contend 
with the goat for tomato cans in the alley. I have a 
fair line of the same to lay before your eyes when I 
am admitted inside the aristocratic front gate: some 
of them will make a fine effect in a ring around your 
geranium bed." 

Conceive this vigorous image-making faculty irre- 
sponsibly applied to the thousand and one subjects of 
casual talk; conceive it stimulated by the enthusiasm 
of youthful comradeships, and invited by the endless 
leisure of vagrant country walks in spring, or of long 
winter evenings spent toasting before an open-grate 
fire, in an atmosphere of tobacco smoke and hot rum 
toddy; conceive it returning upon itself at will, and 
constructing day by day a special cosmogony and 
vocabulary of its own. One such winter evening I shall 
never forget, when in the small hours the talk grew 
youthfully philosophic, and Moody, his ever ruddy 
face flushed with the excitement of improvisation, 
leaning out from swirls of smoke and emphasizing his 

ix 



INTRODUCTION 

points with outstretched pipe, drew a picture of man 
in the universe as a frog in a well, condemned always 
to darkness, destined never to know what was in the 
world above. I dare say it was only warmed-over 
Kantianism ; certainly the toddy contributed much to 
its impressiveness ; but when the rich cadences of his 
voice died away it was to a solemn silence, with the 
two youthful philosophers thoroughly awed at their 
own imaginings. 

Something of the same solemnity that invests that 
image of the frog in the well hangs about certain other 
conceptions that acquired for us, chiefly from Moody's 
eloquence, a largely representative value. "It," for 
example, referred to in the letters, transcends the ex- 
planation it seems to require, because it both denotes 
something so indefinable, and connotes something so 
incommunicable. " It " is everything, taken together, 
that may be the object of a youthful idealist's devotion ; 
it is the sum total of all that is beautiful and worthy of 
loyalty in the world ; it is what it is happiness to remem- 
ber, wretchedness to forget. A "diastole," also men- 
tioned in the letters, is a mood in which, so to speak, 
the spiritual circulation is good (the figure is, of course, 
drawn from the physiology of the heart) ; it is a mood of 
vitality, of realization, of fulfilment. Such moods we 
made it a point of honor, as well as a privilege, to cele- 
brate by communication. Systoles we may also have 
experienced, but usually we had the courage not to 
talk about them. The most curious term of all, nam- 
ing a type of humanity rather than a general idea, was 



INTRODUCTION 

"Prltchard" — originally the name of a young work- 
ing-man we met one evening during one of our long 
aimless walks. In some occult way he typified for us 
Philistinism — all the dull, prosaic world which was 
our enemy. In some still more occult way (though 
possibly cocktails had something to do with it) he 
mystically blossomed into one of the elect. From that 
time forth, "Pritchard" was for us the divinity in the 
average man. 

Crudely youthful as were some of these notions and 
formulations, they played a genuine part in Moody's 
development, and reverberations of them may be 
caught by the attentive ear throughout his poems and 
letters. They were at any rate generous, and sprang 
from a fine idealistic enthusiasm. Moreover, they 
illustrate, in their persistent tendency to take on figu- 
rative form, what one comes finally to consider the 
fundamental quality of his mind. Metaphor was his 
natural mode of expression. It occurred to him as 
spontaneously for a capricious snap-shot at everyday 
life as for the more deliberate description in a letter or 
for the noble setting-forth of his poetic dramas. Its 
manifestations in casual talk had one element of charm 
peculiarly their own. One does not get, alas, in the 
poetry, or even in the letters, the comment of personal 
gesture and inflection on these crowding figments of 
his fancy: the gathering amusement in his eyes as he 
elaborated some conceit; the portentous seriousness 
with which he brought forth his exaggerations or absur- 
dities; the final bursting shout of laughter, when the 

xi 



INTRODUCTION 

dam gave way, that shook his whole frame with its 
physical gusto. 

The distinctive trait of his mind was thus, I have 
always thought, rather its imaginative power than its 
purely Intellectual scope or subtlety: he was far more 
poet than philosopher. There is in his books, to be 
sure, even though it be obscured sometimes, especially 
in the prose plays, by touches of sentimentalism, a 
wisdom both noble and broad ; in daily intercourse one 
loved the sweetness and sanity of his mind quite as 
much as one admired its bold constructiveness ; and 
his imagination itself, however untrammeled, owed 
much of its vigor to a kind of tenacious consecutiveness 
akin to logic. Nevertheless must one Insist that he 
characteristically saw the world not from the detached 
point of view of philosophy, and under its cold, even 
illumination, but rather as a glowing focus where the 
rays of passionate sympathetic interest for the moment 
converged, brilliantly relieved against semi-obscurity. 
He leaned always toward the extremes of statement in 
which such a vision, with its sharp chiaroscuro, natu- 
rally expresses itself. He was too eager in the vivid 
presentment of what he had felt intensely to linger 
over peddling accuracies of qualification. He seized 
upon his subject, isolated and magnified it. Many 
amusing instances of his exaggeration may be found 
in the letters. "There are three hundred and twenty- 
three hand-organs and ninety-seven pianos on our 
block," he writes from his New York lodgings in 
1900, "and every hour thirty-five thousand drays 

xii 



INTRODUCTION 

loaded with sheet-iron pass the house. Irving Place, 
you know, is a quiet old-fashioned neighborhood, so we 
are justly proud of these slight evidences of anima- 
tion." From Chicago he sends the plaint, during one 
of his periods of teaching: "I counted my vocabulary 
last night, and discovered it to consist of ninety-three 
words. You shall have them all, if you will promise 
not to be reckless with them." Such passages as these 
help us to understand the over-luxuriance of his 
youthful poetic style. If we consider, furthermore, 
that his native tendency to extravagance was fostered, 
almost from the first, by an acquired rhetorical virtu- 
osity the exercise of which must have been highly ex- 
citing, we shall be able to account for the turgidity of 
much of his early verse. 

But if both temperament and technical skill thus 
inclined him rather toward romantic luxuriance than 
toward classic chastity, only the more remarkable 
becomes the tireless discipline by which he trained 
himself to achieve the sobriety and distinction of such 
later pieces as, say, the lyrics in "The Fire-Bringer." 
We are reminded of Verdi's progress from "II Trova- 
tore" to "Otello," or Wagner's from " Rienzi" to " Die 
Meistersinger," by a poet who begins with rococo effects 

like 

" Yet her shy devious lambent soul 
With my slow soul should walk," ^ 

and ends with such noble simplicities as 

1 See first draft of "Wilding Flower," page 58. 
xiii 



INTRODUCTION 

"Of wounds and sore defeat 
I made my battle stay; 
Winged sandals for my feet 
I wove of my delay; 
Of weariness and fear 
I made my shouting spear; 
Of loss, and doubt, and dread, 
And swift oncoming doom, 
I made a helmet for my head 
And a floating plume." ^ 

No one not endowed by nature with a vivid imagin- 
ation and an eagerly sympathetic spirit could have 
written lines like these; but furthermore, no one thus 
endowed could have written them, had he not long 
schooled himself in the subtle arts of moderation, just 
emphasis, and suggestion. I hardly know which the 
more to admire in Moody as a poet, the native rich- 
ness of his mind, or the patient art by which he learned 
to draw from it so pure a harmony. 

The reader may perhaps welcome, for the Insight 
they give into both qualities, a few more examples of 
his early work than he decided to include in the 
"Poems" of 1 90 1. What he rejected then, as not 
representative of his artistry at its best, we may now 
find well worth study, as revealing something of the 
processes by which it was attained, especially when we 
can examine the piece in the light of his own comment, 
as in the case of "Wilding Flower." "Heart's Wild- 
Flower," as he renamed the revised form of it printed 
^ "The Fire- B ringer," Act I. 

xiv 



INTRODUCTION 

in the "Poems," is one of his loveliest lyrics. It suc- 
ceeds in saying what he considered to be "a thing which 
constitutes much of the poetry of a young man's hfe," 
and in saying it not more eloquently than simply, with 
much of exquisite music, and no jarring notes. With 
this version well in mind, turn to the first draft, sent 
with the letter of May i6, 1896,^ and examine it in 
some detail. First of all may be noted so apparently 
trivial a matter as the way of printing the stanza : six 
short verses in the earlier form, three long ones in the 
later. The short verses break the free sweep of the 
rhythm. In many places the difference may be negli- 
gible, but at the end of the next to the last stanza, for 
example, the wondrous charm of the rhythm is much 
enhanced by printing all in one line 

"Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesitancies, and tears." 

Secondly, the author has ruthlessly deleted stanzas 
li-viii of the original version — more than half of the 
entire poem. So heroic an amputation was necessitated 
chiefly by the obscurity of the suspended construction 
in stanzas iv-vi, which he admitted only after consid- 
erable argument, and reluctantly, as will be seen from 
the letter of June 23. Indeed, as in most revisions, 
there was here a loss as well as a gain ; for he was quite 
right in pointing out the effect of " breathlessness and 
holding aloof" secured by the suspension, and in com- 
paring its constructive value to that of an organ point 
in music. The omission of stanza iii also sacrifices the 
» Page 56. 
XV 



INTRODUCTION 

delicate preparation it made for the final stanza. But 
sacrifices are not sacrifices unless they cost something, 
and skillful revision consists precisely in this wise 
balancing of complex accounts. It was worth while at 
almost any price to get rid of the "flushed adventur- 
ous violins," "the tower noon-precipiced," and the 
"aching oboe throat that twins Night's moonward 
melodist," which are the youthful Moody at his 
worst. 

In the third place, the substitutions made in the 
retained stanzas are all noteworthy, most of them 
because they tend toward simplicity. Such, for in- 
stance, are "spirit fire" for "lilac fire," "crown of 
tears and flame" for "carcanet of flame," "autumn 
woe" for "subtle woe," "a little gift" for "a mystic 
gift," and the poignant "shy, shy wilding flowers" for 
the rather literary "lovesome wilding flowers." Most 
interesting of all, however, are the alterations in the 
third stanza of the present version, as not merely 
verbal but affecting the conception itself, toning it 
down from the extreme and acrid terms into which 
Moody's instinct for potent expression had led him, 
into much juster, tenderer ones. 

" Not such a sign as women wear 
Who bow beneath the shame 
Of marriage insolence, and bear 
A housewife's faded name" — 

which exaggerates the contrast and repels us by its 
harshness, becomes — 

xvi 



INTRODUCTION 

"Not such a sign as women wear who make their foreheads 

tame 
With life's long tolerance, and bear love's sweetest, humblest 
name." 

Here the rhetorical antithesis remains unimpaired, 
and there is a marked gain in spiritual propriety, and 
consequently in artistic dignity. 

Finally it is well to note, after we have made all 
possible criticism of this first draft on the scores of 
obscurity of construction, turgidity of thought, or 
intemperance of language, that these are after all the 
faults of excess rather than of defect, and that in spite 
of them, and in some degree even because of them, the 
mind at work here shows itself to be thoroughly alive. 
If it has the crudity, it has also the teeming vitality of 
youth. Its exuberance is infinitely to be preferred to the 
pallid correctness of academicism. Its mistakes are 
those of a generous, independent nature daring enough 
to attempt something new, and its failures are of the 
inspiring kind that in all artistic paths pave the way to 
future successes. One is glad to think that even in his 
moments of discouragement he had the pioneer's sus- 
taining sense of adventure and discovery, as when he 
writes: " I think — pardon the egotism of the utterance 
(you would if you knew what tears of failure have gone 
to water the obstreperous little plant) — I think you 
are not tolerant enough of the instinct for conquest in 
language, the attempt to push out its boundaries, to 
win for it continually some new swiftness, some rare 
compression, to distil from it a more opaline drop. 

xvii 



INTRODUCTION 

Is n't it possible, too, to be pedantic in the demand for 
simplicity? It's a cry which, if I notice aright, nature 
has a jaunty way of disregarding. Command a rose- 
bush in the stress of June to purge itself; coerce a con- 
volvulus out of the paths of catachresis. Amen!" 

In this endeavor, thus early put before himself as a 
conscious ideal, to win for language "some new swift- 
ness, some rare compression," Moody found, as time 
went on, not only an unfailing interest, but an object 
worthy his most tireless devotion, his most unswerving 
loyalty : he had the passion of the old alchemists for the 
distillation of that ''more opaline drop." Impatient as 
he might be of the drudgery of teaching or hack- 
writing, in his poetic work no labor could dismay him. 
He loved to take pains. I especially remember the trick 
he had, in his rough drafts, of making endless substitu- 
tions of words, choosing first one and then another, 
striking out each in turn and surmounting it with the 
next, until some of his lines looked like the pediments 
of ruined temples, with columns of words rising at 
irregular intervals to unequal heights. To find him in 
his studio on a working morning (if one had the temer- 
ity), in a cloud of tobacco smoke, threading a labyrinth 
of emendations, surrounded by the carnage of previous 
encounters — burnt matches, scattered ashes, and 
discarded sheets — was to conceive a new respect for 
an art which could so completely conceal itself. His 
production was necessarily slow. The "Masque of 
Judgment," for example, was begun in the summer of 
1897, written out in fragmentary shape a year later 

xviii 



INTRODUCTION 

during the holiday in Italy, and elaborated in London 
in the spring of 1899 to twice its previous proportions. 
** There are," he mentions in December of that year, 
"counting rewriting and further development here 
and there, about five hundred lines to be added." It 
was finally completed in Boston early in 1900. "The 
Faith-Healer," which was not finished until the last 
year of his life, 19 10, was begun, as the letters show, 
fifteen years before, in December, 1895. 

Some sense of the devotion and the deliberateness 
with which he wrote his poetry is necessary to an 
understanding of his loathing for what he calls in one 
of his early Chicago letters "the crowd of spiteful 
assiduous nothings that keep me from It." Although 
he recognized with his usual fair-mindedness that he 
must pay his way by teaching or some similar form of 
"useful" work, and punctilious as he was in the dis- 
charge of these duties, he could not but resent their 
intrusion on time that he needed for work of infinitely 
greater intrinsic value. And they not only absorbed 
his time — they dulled his mental edge, and when 
long continued robbed him of "the spirit of selec- 
tion, the zest of appropriation" which is the life of 
an artist. Consequently no note is more recurrent 
in the first letters from Chicago than that of a discon- 
tent with his new surroundings which was doubtless 
only partly due to the specific quality of the place, and 
is chiefly to be attributed to the distastefulness of his 
pursuits there. 

Indeed the comments on Chicago, though all inter- 

xix 



INTRODUCTION 

esting, are oddly contradictory, and suggest a ceaseless 
alternation of moods. The mere physical spaciousness 
of the Western landscape seems sometimes to have 
oppressed, sometimes to have excited him. "Cam- 
bridge, mellow and autumnal," he writes soon after 
his arrival, "begins already to loom symbolic, under 
the stress of this relentless prairie light and vast fea- 
tureless horizon." Yet, a month later, "To be a poet," 
he cries, "is a much better thing than to write poetry 
— out here, at least, watched by these wide horizons, 
beckoned to by these swift streamers of victorious sun- 
set." Both of these opposed moods are not only ex- 
pressed but philosophically penetrated in the beautiful 
letter of February i6, 1896, about the Irish girl he met 
skating. 

What he called the "Western heartiness and 
uniplexity" subjected him to similar fluctuations of 
feeling. "As for Chicago," he tells Mrs. Toy, "I find 
that it gives me days or at least hours of broad-gauge 
Whitmanesque enthusiasm, meagrely sprinkled over 
weeks of tedium." In the long run he seems to have 
felt the deprivations more than the advantages: "In 
the East . . . one had n't to go far before finding 
some refinement of feeling, some delicate arabesque of 
convention, to help make up for the lack of liberty. 
Out here there is even less liberty (because less thought) 
and there is nothing — or next to nothing — to com- 
pensate." He describes in a memorable sentence of the 
same letter the deadly effect of such monotony on his 
eagerly adventurous mind — " that awful hush settling 

XX 



INTRODUCTION 

down on everything, as if To Udv had suddenly dis- 
covered himself to be stuffed with sawdust." 

The truth is, Moody was not made to wear content- 
edly, anywhere, the academic harness and blinders: 
he was too full of the untamable wildness of the crea- 
tive mind which he has expressed so incomparably in 
his "Road-Hymn for the Start." 

" Dear shall be the banquet table where their singing spir- 
its press; 
Dearer be our sacred hunger, and our pilgrim loneliness." 

No one so insatiably curious about life as he was, so 
ardent to learn, could give himself with patience to 
teaching. How many times must he have felt that im- 
pulse he confesses to "trundle his Httle instructorial 
droning-gear into Lake Michigan, and step out west or 
south on the Open Road, a free man by the grace of 
God, and a tramp by Rachel's intercession"! How 
dead and buried must he have seemed to himself when 
he computed in January, 1898, "April is only eighty- 
eight lectures, forty committee meetings, and several 
thousand themes away"! And how archly, a little 
later, as the months nevertheless elapse, does he para- 
phrase Wordsworth: "My heart leaps up when I be- 
hold a calendar on the sly " ! When the vacations do at 
last arrive, and he is free once more to take up his own 
work, it is exciting to read of his joy. " I can feel the 
holy influences that wait on him who loafs beginning 
to purge me and urge me, though I tremble to say so 
for fear of frightening back their shy inquiring tenta- 

xxi 



INTRODUCTION 

cles." "The summer I am bound to have though the 
Heavens fall, or rather because they are not going to 
fall but remain as a fittingly modest framework for the 
spectacle of my felicity." 

It is worth while to insist with some amplitude of 
detail on the disharmony between Moody's economic 
conditions and his spiritual needs, both because his 
resolution of the discord was accomplished with a tact 
and courage that reveal much of what is finest in his 
character, and more generally because this ApoUo- 
Admetus problem is fundamental in the life of every 
artist, and Moody's example is therefore a widely 
inspiring one. His friends could never sufficiently 
admire the quiet self-respect with which he pursued a 
course midway between the extremes where so many 
gifted natures meet shipwreck. In the first place, he 
was both too honest and too shrewd to shirk his service 
to Admetus — that irreducible minimum of it which 
he had decided to be necessary. He could even, 
thanks to his imagination, take the point of view of the 
task-master, see what was reasonably to be expected 
of the servant, and understand the fatuity of evading 
it. He always fulfilled his obligations to the letter. 
When he was working on his "History of English 
Literature," for instance, at Gloucester, in May, 1900, 
— a month when moors and sea are at their most 
seductive, — he may have found it necessary, as he 
whimsically states, to "put on blinders, stuff his ears 
with wax, and strap himself to the desk"; but at 
least the work done in that constricted position was 

xxii 



INTRODUCTION 

solid and workmanlike, as any one may see for him- 
self. 

On the other hand, he never forgot for a moment 
that such work was but a means to an end ; he never 
tolerated the sentimental fallacy that faithfulness in 
the treadmill exempts one from the higher responsi- 
bilities of a liberal leisure ; he never gave Admetus one 
jot more than was nominated in the bond. Thus he 
refused the offer, from Chicago University, of the full 
salary of a professor for lectures during one quarter 
each year: a single quarter was too much. Of course 
the price of such devotion was poverty. His method 
was to labor at teaching or hack-writing until he had 
accumulated a little money, and then to live on it as 
simply as possible as long as it lasted, too happy in 
composition to mind small discomforts. That it lasted 
longer in Europe than at home was one reason of 
his frequent voyages. Fortunately he did not need a 
large income. Aside from a barbaric fondness for 
jewelry and fancy waistcoats his personal tastes were 
inexpensive; though fond of the society of cultivated 
people, he had not the least trace of snobbery; almost 
his only financial luxury was the help he often extended 
to relatives and friends less prosperous than himself. 
Even with these advantages, however, he showed, it 
seems to me, a clear-headedness in the discrimina- 
tion between immediate and ultimate values, and a 
stanch courage in the refusal to let the nearer interfere 
with the greater, as difficult to attain, and as rare, as 
they are admirable and worthy of emulation. 

xxiii 



INTRODUCTION 

The entire freedom of his work from the influences 
of commercialism, even in its most insidious and seduc- 
tive forms, is due, I am sure, to this faculty he had of 
keeping money-earning and art as completely sepa- 
rated in his mind as they are in reality. It was placed 
in such striking relief by the circumstances, unprece- 
dented in his hitherto obscure life, surrounding the 
production of ''The Great Divide" in the autumn of 
1906 (the single decisive worldly success of his short 
career) that I remember vividly what he told me of his 
affairs during a brief visit in the country soon after 
the opening night. He was then earning about five 
hundred dollars a week from the play, and was 
besieged by reporters, publishers, managers, and gen- 
eral social invitations. He was also quite unspoiled 
by it all, as simple in manner and cordial in talk as 
ever, and more enthusiastic over the beauties of the 
country than over the glories of Broadway. In the 
course of a long morning walk he told me that he 
hoped sometime to be able to buy a farm, where he 
could write undisturbed, and that now for the first 
time, among those New England hills, he realized how 
he had been tempted by large offers, received from 
four different publishers, for "The Great Divide" in 
novel form. Such sums had been mentioned as twenty- 
five, and even fifty, thousand dollars. But it had always 
seemed to him, he said, that the turning of a play into a 
novel, or vice versa, was a confounding of two essentially 
diverse types of art, and therefore a violation of a ba- 
sic artistic principle ; and he had refused all the offers. 

xxiv 



INTRODUCTION 

Not that there was anything of the prig in him — 
his sympathies were far too broad for that. The notes 
in which he discusses with Mr. Gilder the suppression 
of his initials on the poem written in his honor reveal a 
characteristic mingling of modesty as to his own attain- 
ments with delight in the appreciation of others and 
tender concern for their feelings. He had, too, that 
rarest form of humor which enables a man to laugh 
at himself, and an artist to relish parodies of his own 
style. We see it in the letter of January 24, 1901, 
to Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson, in which he plays 
with the notion of how his "florid vocabulary" may 
affect a brother poet of the opposed method, a devotee 
of under-statement. Even in college days, when some 
solemnity of egotism is almost the accepted attitude, 
he had already this self-immolating humor. A college 
mate, I remember, used to make fun of the "foolish 
little cricket thing" in the song, "My love is gone into 
the East,"^ and to turn the third stanza into baldest 
prose by the simple device of changing "or late or 
soon" into "sooner or later." That Moody may have 
been a little nettled as well as amused is suggested by 
his request, when he sent me " Dawn Parley" a year or 
two later, that before reading it I abstract myself for 
twelve hours from the society of the jester; but all the 
same he thoroughly enjoyed the joke, and recurs to it 
with unction in his letter of December i, 1895. When 
he was writing "Gloucester Moors," at East Glouces- 
ter, in the spring of 1900, he asked a lady at the hotel, 

* "Poems and Plays," vol. I, p. 151. 

XXV 



INTRODUCTION 

learned in wild-flowers, to tell him the names of all she 
knew, and used some of them in the second stanza — 

"Jill o'er the ground is purple blue, 
Blue is the quaker-maid." 

One item in the catalogue, baby blue-eye, brought 
from him a shout of laughter, and the suggestion that 
it ought to be incorporated in the line 

** Baby blue is the baby blue-eye." 

In the long run, and after all analysis, it is Moody's 
broad humanity that stands out as the most lovable 
trait of the man and the imperishable quality in the 
poet. He accepted human nature, and glorified it. He 
pitied its fallibility and admired its aspiration ; and he 
identified himself with it, frankly recognizing in his 
own character the two conflicting elements. From one 
of his most serious letters, to a friend who does not 
wish it to be published entire, the following passage 
may be taken as a touching illustration : — 

"Thanks for your word of cheer. It found me in a 
state of dejection compounded of grippe and unfaith- 
fulness, and lifted me to the heights again — the only 
climate that suits my lungs these days, though the 
valleys with their lights and business are tempting 
when night sets in, and too often betray me downward. 
... I needed the good word you sent me more than a 
little, and am in your debt a trifle deeper than before — 
if a matter of a few thousands is worth counting in 
my hopeless insolvency. If my work, stumbling and 

xxvi 



INTRODUCTION 

delaj^ed as it usually seems to me, gives you any help 
in the contemplation, consider what the candour and 
spiritual grace of your character have been and are to 
me, looking with eyes no less wistful after righteous- 
ness for being somewhat bleared and dazzled by sen- 
suous strayings. These things are perhaps best left 
unsaid, but now and then one forgets that he is an 
Anglo-Saxon and remembers only that he is a man, 
with a man's eternal aims, and a man's chances of 
help and hindrance on the tragic road ; for which former 
it is not unbecoming from time to time to give thanks 
somewhat soberly." 

Such a passage as this evokes for us afresh, and with 
an even more intimate sense of personal presence, the 
generous nature that has expressed this religion of 
humanity with incomparable power in Raphael's 
hymn to man in Act in of the " Masque of Judgment." 
Deeply spiritual, and as far as possible removed from 
the sensualism the thoughtless have found in it, is his 
paganism, as there set forth, his belief in the feelings, 
the passions, and the senses. He conceives them all 
as ministers of spirituality, and sees them transfigured 
in that ministration. He believes that through them 
alone is spirituality realized, or realizable. 

"Not in vain, not in vain," 
sings Raphael, — 

"The spirit hath its sanguine stain, 
And from its senses five doth peer 
As a fawn from the green windows of a wood." 

xxvii 



INTRODUCTION 

To his mind the only possible attitude was a hearty- 
acceptance of life as a whole. He was an enemy of 
nothing that is positive, but only of the negative 
things: doubt, cowardice, indifference, all ascetic 
denials of life. The reader of the letters that follow 
will, it is hoped, come ever more clearly to recognize the 
warm-hearted, welcoming personality that speaks in 
them. He was one of the few who can use, in their 
fullest sense, the words he has put into the mouth of 
Raphael : — 

" O struggler in the mesh 
Of spirit and of flesh 
Some subtle hand hath tied to make thee Man, 

My bosom yearns above thee at the end, 
Thinking of all thy gladness, all thy woe; 

Whoever is thy foe, 
I am thy friend, thy friend." 

D. G. M. 

New York, April, 1913. 



SOME LETTERS OF 

Ig^iUtam laauQl^n jEooDt 



SOME LETTERS OF 

l^tlUam Vm^n iEooti? 

In spite of his habitual extreme reticence about 
personal and family affairs, Moody once confided to 
me that when, in the fall of 1889, he entered Harvard 
College, his entire capital consisted of twenty-five 
dollars.^ He was also partly responsible for the support 
of one of his sisters, I believe ; though his statements 
were always so vague on these points that even after 
knowing him years one was never surprised at the 
sudden cropping up in his conversation of a hitherto 
uncatalogued relative. Certain it is that he worked 
hard at typewriting, tutoring, proctoring, — anything 
he could find to do, meanwhile studying to such good 
purpose that at the end of the third year he had enough 
points for graduation. He accordingly spent his senior 
year abroad, tutoring a boy in order to earn his way. 
It was at this time that he made the first of his many 
visits to Greece. The winter he spent chiefly in Flor- 
ence. 

During his undergraduate years at Cambridge he had 
contributed some verse to the Harvard Monthly, and 

1 William Vaughn Moody was born July 8, 1869, at Spencer, 
Indiana. 

3 



SOME LETTERS OF 

he continued these contributions during his travels 
and after his return to Cambridge as a graduate stu- 
dent and instructor. Other Harvard Monthly poets of 
his day were Philip Henry Savage, also of the class 
of 1893, Hugh McCulloch (1892), and, a little earlier, 
Dr. George Santayana (1886). In the later class of 
1895 was graduated his friend Joseph Trumbull Stick- 
ney,of whose posthumous book of poems he was one of 
the editors. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

[Sept. 5, 1892.] 
Warwick. [England.] 
Dear Robert: 

We arrived here yesterday (Sept. 4) after a 
charming two weeks in the Scotch and English 
lakes, and expect to remain for ten days or so. 
I hope that you and Dow can get in your English 
trip before we leave Warwickshire, so that I can 
give you the benefit of my accumulated experience 
in dealing with the Insolent Briton and in viewing 
the historic monuments of his insolence. These 
midland counties are excellently beautiful, to use 
Mr. Howells's solemn phrase, and beautiful in a 
fresh wide-awake way which will appeal to you 
doubly after the sultry splendor of Italy. . . . 

Will M . 

^4 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

[Paris, October, 1892.] 
Dear Robert: 

Will you add another star to the crown the 
Lord keeps for those who waver not in friendship, 
by receiving the package of books which I send 
by this mail, paying the custom-house charges (if 
there are any) and forwarding the package to the 
address below? . . . 

I hope to receive the Monthly regularly. Am 
sorry not to send anything for the October num- 
ber. I have turned Pegasus out to pasture and he 
eateth much green grass, but inclineth not to 
soar. . . . 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

[Paris, Nov. 22, 1892.] 
Dear Robert: 

Please receive my heartfelt thanks for the tele- 
gram, the book-forwarding, the rank list and the 
assessment notice. . . . After all sorts of persua- 
sion, physical and moral, the rank list refuses to 
disgorge more than five A's for me, which leaves 
me with only thirteen and a half toward a summa. 
I fear even your professional aplomb will be 
staggered by the hopelessness of the situation. 

5 



SOME LETTERS OF 

So far I have had little time and no inclina- 
tion for study, but under the sedative influence 
of German beer and German beauties I hope to 
get my pulses down to a pace where grinding will 
be a delirious adventure. We have been in Paris 
now seven weeks and I have learned this dainty 
Sodom tolerably well, I flatter myself. I dare say 
your fingers are reaching instinctively after your 
blue pencil, to put the mark of eternal damnation 
on my adjective. But I insist on dainty. After 
three or four nights spent with "les gens qui 
s'amusent" in some of the places where a fortu- 
nate acquaintance with a French officer gave me 
entrance, I am sure that never in the history of 
man was the scarlet robe so delicately woven or of 
so gossamer a texture. I send a piece of verse — 
for which, I fear, your blue pencil will have the 
same horrible affinity. Read it yourself first and 
let not mercy season justice. If it is printed I 
should like to have a proof if possible. . . . 

Will. 
To Robert Morss Lovett 

[Dresden: April ii, 1893.] 
Dear Robert: 

I was overjoyed to find a letter from you wait- 
ing for me in Dresden, doubly so as I had had no 

6 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

mail since leaving Italy, six weeks before. We 
were unfortunately prevented from accepting the 
Grand Llama's invitation, but made up for it in 
part by hobnobbing with the Sultan in Constanti- 
nople, the quality of whose wine and rose-leaf 
jelly is absolutely beyond criticism. We had the 
good luck to strike some of the Lord's people on 
leaving Italy, Mr. Edward Lowell and family, 
and spent three weeks with them in Greece — 
three weeks of flawless enjoyment for me, in spite 
of the resin in the wine and the ubiquitous prowl- 
ing of the Philistine. After doing what could 
be easily done from Athens, — Eleusis, Phylae, 
Aegina, and Marathon, — we went down to 
Nauplia in the Peloponnesus, and made flying 
trips to Epidaurus, Argos and Mycenae. Instead 
of coming into Germany by way of Triest we 
chose the Aegean route, and spent a week in 
Constantinople, studying the mind and manners 
of ye sad-eyed Mussulman. So that my time has 
been pretty well taken up for a long time, and 
your rebuke on the subject of letterwriting is only 
half merited, or at least so I try to believe for 
ease of conscience sake. Two belated and badly- 
battered Monthlies have reached me — the Octo- 
ber and January numbers, I think, but aside from 

7 



SOME LETTERS OF 

this and a newspaper clipping now and then, 
Harvard and her doings have been pure conjec- 
ture for me. I am sorry not to have been able to 
send anything for padding, but I have had neither 
time nor inclination to write. The outline of 
Italian II came to hand all right and I am 
infinitely obliged. I have put all my spare time on 
Dante so far, and probably shall not try now to 
work up Sheldon's course — I have not the nerve 
to throw such sand in the maw of the faculty 
Cerberus, lest he should turn and rend me. These 
days I suck much milk from the paps of the 
Wagnerian muse, so far without any symptoms of 
spiritual colic — Walkiire and Tannhauser last 
week, with a prospect of the whole Rheingold 
cycle next. Your flashlight description of the 
meeting of the church in Laodicea was most 
picturesque and made me horribly homesick for 
such communion — whether God is blackballed 
or not I am a candidate for the first vacant posi- 
tion as usher or organ-boy. Also the Italian 
restaurant k la Luino wrung my bowels with 
envious longings of a curious gastro-psychic 
complexity. We sail from Genoa May 24, and 
shall be in Boston by the 5th or 6th of June, so that 
I can attend to everything but the gown, which I 

8 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

would be glad if you would order for me according 
to the enclosed measurements. I have applied for 
a fellowship for next year, and if I get it shall 
come back for an indefinite period. I hope you 
will be a doorkeeper still, even if Providence 
has n't the good taste to make you a burner 
of myrrh before the inmost altars. ... I have 
about decided not to spread on Class-day, as it is 
a huge bother and being away all year has kept 
me clear of social debts. Do you think it advisable 
to spread under the circumstances? ... As ever, 

Will. 

Of Moody's undergraduate verse there is little if any 
that he, as an artist, would care to have preserved. His 
Class Day Poem, however, called "The Song of the 
Elder Brothers," has an autobiographical interest that 
justifies the quotation of a few stanzas here. All 
through his life the contrast between the fresh vitality 
of the west and the mellower civilization of the east 
exercised his imagination ; as a man he felt it strongly 
in coming from his Indiana village to Harvard, and 
later to Florence and Greece; as an artist he tried at 
various times to picture it, notably in "The Great 
Divide." The class day poem shows that in his under- 
graduate years he was already keenly aware of the 
quality of Harvard, and what is more, conscious of his 
personal debt to its traditions. 

9 



SOME LETTERS OF 

The nucleus of the poem is the song in praise and 
thanksgiving to Alma Mater which the poet attributes 
to his spiritual "elder brothers," to all those who 
before him 

"Saw the looming of the gates 
That open unto larger seas, 
Who heard the singing of the breeze 
That calls to sweeter, lonelier fates. 

Longfellow, with the blossomed hair 
And low-tuned lyre, who sings alway; 
' Behind the cloud is golden day, 
So let us fare as children fare.' 

And Emerson, who stops and hears 
The pine trees' ancient overtones, 
Who listens at the hearts of stones, 
And weighs the star-dust and the years. 

And all the other men who brought 
Some message from beyond the bar 
Of sense, where ever chime and jar 
The opalescent seas of thought." 

After describing the song of these elder brothers, 
and asking what answer we who "kneel now before the 
mother's face" shall send, he continues: — 

"Shall we not say: 'While sunset flings 
Through our great hall its jewelled rain, 

10 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

From windows blazoned with their train 
Of poets, saints, and soldier kings. 

So long shall this our college throw 
Across the loud noon, bare and bright, 
A jewelled and a sunset light, 
A many-ribboned golden glow. 

While Charles's chivalry doth shine 
Upon the pane, her halls shall hold 
Such hearts as gave up land and gold 
And went to die in Palestine. 



So long as Homer clasps his lyre 
Among us some shall still be found. 
About whose brows the gods have wound 
Song's amaranthine buds of fire. 

While Shakespeare waits and seems to scan 
Each form that passes in the dusk. 
One here shall break away the husk 
Which hides the fruit-sweet heart of man.' 

So shall we answer, kneeling low, 
Feeling the time draw very near 
To part, and common things grow dear, 
And things forgotten clearer grow. 

Long, mellow twilights in the Yard, 
The peace that settles from the trees, 
The tinkle of guitars, the leas 
Of laughter dripping sweet as nard ; 

II 



SOME LETTERS OF 

The lazy Charles at noon; the long 
Salt meadows; the slow beat of oars; 
Faint cheery calls; across the moors 
The great tower rising like a song; 

Till we can only bow the head, 
Waiting the Mother's gracious ken, 
And reach across the years to when 
We, too, may say as those have said: 

* Fair Harvard ! Mother fair and grand ! 
Behold, we are thy children too; 
Great mother from whose breast we drew 
The larger strength of brain and hand 1 

Lo, have we borne a knightly sword? 

Thy kiss was misty on the blade ! 

Lo, men's hearts have we stirred and swayed? 

Thou puttest in our mouth the word!'" 

The year after his graduation Moody spent in study 
at Cambridge, eking out a slender income by the 
editorial labors on Bulfinch's Mythology with Mr. 
Lovett to which the letters refer, and in other ways. 
Then came a year as instructor in English composition 
under his friend Professor Lewis E. Gates, and in the 
spring of 1895 the summons to Chicago University 
which took him thither in the following fall. 

During his two graduate years at Harvard he wrote 
a good many poems, but they were for the most part 
immature and more or less imitative of Keats, Ros- 
setti, Walt Whitman, and especially Browning. Al- 

12 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

though he profited much from the writing of them, 
especially in his rhythms, eventually so marvellous in 
their subtlety and variety, he considered most of 
them only studies, as is shown by his omitting them 
from the ** Poems " of 190 1. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

Dear Robert: 

As you purpose returning so soon, I think I will 
not come to Waterville, as the present stringency 
in the money market has at last crippled even my 
immense resources. Do not hurry back on Bul- 
finch's account, however; I will have a general 
supervision over Zeus's amours, and will keep 
Here out of his hair until such time as the color 
fadeth out of the Waterville sky and the dregs 
in the wine cup grow bitter. Till then, farewell. 

Will M . . 

Cambridge, 
Aug. 10, 1893. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 
Dear Rob: 

What became of the Seal Harbor Coeducational 
Trust? I have heard nothing of it and am con- 
sumed with curiosity. My two weeks' taste of the 

13 



SOME LETTERS OF 

World's Fake has left upon my lips the salt of 
vanities. I long even for a swallow of Laodicean 
shaving water to cool my tongue. Hoping to in- 
dulge with you in that mild beverage before long, 

As ever, Will. 

Cambridge, 
September 17, 1893. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

23 Hilton. 
[Cambridge, Feb. 5, 1894.] 
Dear Rob: 

The midyears [examinations] have left me limp 
as a rag, and have convinced me that, instead of 
an amiable divorce such as you suggest, Philology 
and Minerva are destined to part with mutual 
scorn and vituperation, if indeed their feud does 
not result in pistols and pillow-chokings. If you 
want to rescue either of them you must come on 
in March as you promise, for I will not answer 
for their lives a day later than the twentieth. 
Joking aside, though, we all expect you then, and 
are already beginning to plan revels, masques, 
and pageants of royal magnificence to fleet the 
time withal. 



14 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

Stone and Kimball ... are getting out vol- 
umes of verse for Mac and Santy [Hugh McCul- 
loch and George Santayana] and have even 
approached me with harp and psaltery, though so 
far I have had grace from God to resist their 
blandishments. Cambridge is rather good fun 
this winter. The Browning Club, I hear, still 
leads a subterranean existence somewhere, but its 
place in the upper world has been taken by the 
''Folk-lore Society," an organization much af- 
fected by voluptuous young ladies yearning to 
walk in the cold clear light of science. They are 
all saturated with sun-myths, and ghosts, trolls, 
and witches are their daily walk and conversation. 
My frightened attempts to be statistical have 
been frowned upon, and I fear I shall not be a 
success. Mrs. Toy still takes pity on my orphan 
state, and asks me to see interesting people at her 
house. Last Friday I bearded a whole den of lions 
at Mrs. Moulton's — from old Dr. Holmes to 
Robert Grant and old Trowbridge — to say 
nothing of an Oxford prof who has dined with 
Dodo at the Master of Balliol's. Do you have any 
time for writing? Do not bury your talent in a 
napkin — even if the napkin stands for domestic 
bliss and the ground for the goodliness of this 

15 



SOME LETTERS OF 

world. Do make your plans to come on during the 
spring vacation: we refuse to be refused. . . . 

Will. 
Feb. 5, 1894. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

23 Hilton's Block. 
Cambridge. 

I don't know whether you know that I have 
decided to shuffle about next year in your old 
shoes — with Gates in English 22. I should hesi- 
tate to accept it did I not have such splendid 
examples before my eyes of gorgeous scholastic 
butterflies hatched from this dull cocoon. 

June 21, 1894. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Endion Cottage, 
Long Lake, N. Y. 
[Postmarked: July 2 1,1 894 J 
Dear Dan: 

Your somewhat hysterical note reached me just 
as I was leaving Cambridge, and since I reached 
this loafer's paradise I have melted into a spiritual 

16 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

jelly fish, with a corresponding amount of energy 
for letter writing or any other occupation of 
civilized man. I sleep by the week, eat by the 
tub-full, and never have an idea from one day's 
end to another. The hotel, which is a mile up the 
lake, is full of a dull spawn, only human by virtue 
of being made in the likeness of an outraged God. 
My single encounter with the sex has not bristled 
with poetry, for though I sat with her an hour 
every attempt at self-revelation on her part was 
met by my exclamation, unuttered but passion- 
ate, "O brisky juvenal, and eke most lovely 
Jew!" Finding no earthly lips to breathe fire into 
the clay of my longing, I lie doggedly on my back 
under the pines and wait the descent of the 
goddess. Heaven send her soon, or I shall be past 
kissing! To do the place justice though, it is very 
beautiful, and only needs a remotely adequate 
Comer to pant through the blueness^ in order to 
put me in direct communication with Helicon and 
Castaly. 

I suppose you are swimming through rose- 
colored seas of song, with wan breasts glimmering 

* "Come then, complete incompletlon, O comer, 
Pant through the blueness, perfect the summer!" 

Browning: "Wanting is — what?" 

17 



SOME LETTERS OF 

up toward your amorous lips — in other words 
that you have no end of a cinch on Apollo and 
are as much one of Venus^s cosseted darlings as 
you bade fair to be when I left you. Please keep 
me informed concerning the various stages of 

your nearness to 's soul. I presume you 

realize what sort of a risk you run, and in view 
of our talk about direct and indirect passion it 
would be supererogatory for me to hint at my 
firm conviction that the young lady in question is 
deeply conversant with the fact that a straight 
line is the shortest distance between two points, 
and that if you propose to work out any little 
problems in spiritual geometry with her, you will 
have to accept the theorem. 

All my plans of work have crumbled away; I 
simply lie and cumber the earth, outrageously 
contented. I feel myself drifting toward the dam- 
nable heresy that the unlit lamp and the ungirt 
loin^ have their advantages. Can't you throw me 
a rope in the shape of a lyric idea? I should not 
know what to do with it, but it would comfort me. 

Beseechingly, 

W. V. M. 

1 "And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
Is — the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin." 

Browning: " The Statue and the Bust." 
I8 




WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 
(1894) 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

Endion Cottage, 

Long Lake, N. Y. 

[July, 1894.] 

Dear Rob: 

Your letter reached me just as I was leaving 
Cambridge for this hole in the Adirondacks, where 
myself and my sister propose to sleep the summer 
away. It is a stunning place as far as natural 
beauty is concerned, but as yet not even a re- 
motely adequate Comer has consented to pant 
through the blueness. Besides the deer and the 
bears there is nothing to commune with, and the 
single social resource is a hotel a mile up the lake, 
where polypous New Yorkers vaguely swarm. 
Accordingly there is no excuse for me if I do not 
do some good work in one line or another, but I 
greet my opportunity listlessly, with an unlit 
lamp and an ungirt loin, and simply lie under the 
pine trees and cumber the earth in a state of out- 
rageous content. I deeply commiserate you, if you 
propose to stay in that hell's kitchen all summer 
"dribbling biographical details and cheap criti- 
cism." Your outlook on the teacher's mission 
does not seem pregnantly optimistic. I was glad 

19 



SOME LETTERS OF 

to hear that Bulfinch is so near completion — the 
thing must have been a vile bother. . . . 

I hope you will cleave to the plan of coming 
east in September. We will have that dinner at 
Marliave's which missed fire last spring and 
drink a bottle of Chianti to the forgetting of 
sorrows. 

W. V. M. 

To Mrs. C. H. Toy 

Camp Endion. 
Long Lake, N. Y. 
[August, 1894.] 
Dear Mrs. Toy: 

. . . Three bears have been shot on the bor- 
ders of the lake since we came, one of them on the 
spot where we had picnicked the day previous. 
For a decadent spirit, a bewildered moth about the 
candle of latter-day Illumination, I maintain this 
is getting pretty near to Nature's naked bosom. 
Indeed, the forest is no toy forest, but rustles 
and billows away on every hand in miles on miles 
of reverberant color. I can do nothing with it. 
Its brutal mindlessness, its huge insouciance y 
awes and humiliates me. It has away of looking 
over your head with a gay and ferocious oblivion 
of your interesting personality that puts you out 

20 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

of countenance. As you lie on your back under 
these gigantic pines and listen to the inarticulate 
multitudinous life of the thing, you find yourself 
reversing the Fichtean telescope, and coming 
reluctantly to believe that perhaps God could 
manage to think his thoughts without pouring 
himself through just your highly ingenious brain. 
I did not know to be sure that the contrary con- 
viction was at the base of all my thinking, until 
the negation of it was thus thrust into my face — 
but so it is, and the experience is desperately 
debilitating. I have developed a crooning fond- 
ness for the Zeitgeist, now that it looks like a 
fever-clot in the eternal brain, and as I begin to 
suspect that the voice of many prophets prophesy- 
ing is as the noon-fly and the strident midge to 
vex the ears and eyes of God. 



To Robert Morss Lovett 

43 Gray's, 
Cambridge. 
Dear Rob: 

I am in a tight place and need a little money to 
tide me over till the Harvard goose begins to lay 
her meagre eggs. Can you lend me fifty on our 

21 



SOME LETTERS OF 

Bulfinch expectations? I feel very mean to ask 
for it, but being in a hole is being in a hole, and 
the situation transcends philosophy. I shall want 
it for a couple of months at the longest. 
In haste, 

W. V. M. 
Sept. 27, 1894. 

If you are short yourself, you wont hesitate to 
confess, of course. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

43 Gray's, 
Cambridge. 
[October, '94.] 
Dear Rob: 

Your note, with enclosed check, reached me 
yesterday. The aptness of old Bulfinch's remit- 
tance (was Bulfinch the Book or the Man? My 
concepts concerning him have acquired a mythic 
vagueness) — the aptness of the remittance, I 
say, is such as to give a factitious and theatrical 
tinge to the transaction. I hope you have not 
tampered with the Facts of History, for it is 
comforting to think that the ravens still come so 
opportunely to feed the hungering prophet. I had 

22 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

quite made up my mind not to take any of the 
proceeds, as your work on the book after I left it 
must have far exceeded my own Httle scissorings 
and pastings, but necessity is the mother of Hes, 
and I accept as brazenly as if it was my due, 
not however, without a surreptitious pang of 
gratitude. . . . 

As always, 

W. V. M. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

43 Gray's Hall. 
Cambridge. 
Dear Rob: 

You will forgive me for not sooner answering 
your kind letter, when you call to mind your early 
morning and midnight coping with the English 
22 fortnightly. After a long season of prayer and 
watching, I feel that I must turn a deaf ear to 
your alluring invitation, and have written Her- 
rick definitely declining the position. I do this 
with a full realization of how much I am giving 
up, both materially and spiritually. I am sure 
that an experience of Chicago life would have 
been a good thing for me, and it goes without 
saying that the renewed companionship would 

23 



SOME LETTERS OF 

have been no end jolly. At the same time, there 
are other considerations, which I have set forth 
at length in my letter to Herrick and will not 
bore you by repeating here, which make it clear 
to me that I should remain here next year, and 
accept the instructorship which Hill offers me, 
with a prospect, dim perhaps but cherishable, of 
pinching a fellowship at the end of it. The mes- 
sage which Miss Mott-Smith was gracious enough 
to couple with yours lends an added pang to the 
renunciation, but I must be strong to heed not. 
With sincerest gratitude for your kindness in the 
matter and as sincere regret that I cannot now 
see my way clear to joining you in spreading the 
gospel of sweetness and light, I remain 
Faithfully yours, 

W. V. M. 
April 25, 1895. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

43 Gray's Hall, 
Cambridge. 
Dear Rob: 

I have called several times on Damon without 
finding him at home. Hill, I believe, has spoken 

24 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

to him about the Chicago position, and I believe 
he is very likely to accept it if it is offered him. 
He is, in my opinion, the best man for your pur- 
poses now at Harvard, with the possible excep- 
tion of Young, to whom the Rajah has also tenta- 
tively broached the subject. I know less about 
Young myself, but he is in high favor here among 
the undergraduates, and enjoys, I understand, 
the light of the Rajah's countenance. I have 
compunctious visi tings every now and then, as 
I think of the friendly time we might have had 
together next year. You will, however, dwell only 
sporadically upon this earth, and I could not fol- 
low you, except by way of imaginative sympathy, 
into the interstellar spaces which will be your 
real abiding-place — whence comes abatement of 
the pang of renunciation. I hope you will make 
your visit east as early as possible that we may 
have a few days' usufruct of you before your 
wings sprout. 

Hastily, 

Will. 

May 9, 1895. 



SOME LETTERS OF 



To Robert Morss Lovett 

45 Gray's Hall, 

Cambridge. 
Dear Rob: 

You are immensely kind to bestow upon me 
the honors of groomsmanship. I accept with 
delight, duly tempered with a sense of my un- 
worthiness. I have today received a letter from 
my people which changes the outlook for me 
somewhat, as it makes it necessary for me to 
reap a larger harvest of shekels than I have any 
immediate prospect of doing here. If you have 
not as yet made an offer of the Chicago position 
to any one else could you possibly hold it open 
until you come East? Do not think of doing so 
if it involves any risk or inconvenience on either 
your part or Herrick's, but if you are both willing, 
I should be glad. I hope you will not think I take 
an altogether mercenary view of the situation: 
you must take the spiritual sub-intention for 
granted. I shall write Herrick to-day, if I can 
bring myself to brave the scorn which my 
tergiversation will merit at his hands. 

Faithfully, 
May i8, 1895. W. V. M. 

26 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

On July 3, 1895, Moody and I sailed for Europe, 
landing on the 15th at Antwerp, where we were 
joined for a short trip through Brussels, Ghent, Bruges, 
Lille, Amiens, and Beauvais by Professor Gates. 
Moody's delight in the beauty of the cathedrals, the 
picturesqueness of the landscapes, and the bits of talk 
with peasants, servants, and railway acquaintances 
which he never failed to snatch, was a constant pleas- 
ure. The easy transitions his mind made from poetic 
feeling and imagery to the broadest colloquial humor 
made him an incomparable companion. At Amiens, 
for example, he calls the delicate rose-window of the 
cathedral "God's spiderweb"; at Comines, on the 
border of France, charmed with the pure French of the 
waitress, he asks the names of all the viands, and in 
return communicates that the English name of rasp- 
berry jam is ''Red-goo," and with a solemnity that 
convulses us watches her efforts to reproduce it, with 
much rolling of the R. 

On the 26th, Mr. Gates having left for Paris, we 
started on a short walking tour through Brionne, 
I'Hotellerie, Lisieux, Caen, Saint-Lo, Tessy, and Vire. 
At Caen, on a rainy afternoon. Moody made the first 
sketch of the poem which eventually, after much 
revision, became "Jetsam." At Tessy-sur-Vire we 
were awakened before dawn one mornmg by the 
bugles of a regiment passing up one of the narrow 
streets — a valorous music strangely impressive in 
that darkness and silence. Moody has commemorated 
it in the speech of the Third Youth in Act iv of the 
"Masque of Judgment": 

27 



SOME LETTERS OF 

"But always ere the dayspring took the sky, 

Somewhere the silver trumpets were aery, — 

Sweet, high, oh, high and sweet! 

What voice could summon so but the Soul's Paraclete? 

Whom should such voices call but me, to dare and die? 

O ye asleep here in the eyrie town, 

Ye mothers, babes, and maids, and aged men, 

The plain is full of foe-men ! Turn again — 

Sleep sound, or waken half 

Only to hear our happy bugles laugh 

Lovely defiance down, 

As through the steep 

Grey streets we sweep, 

Each horse and man a ribbed fan to scatter all that chaff!" 

Under date August 26th I find in my journal the 
following entry : 

"Boat [Rouen] to Caudebec; thence to Yvetot on 
foot; thence to Havre. Met on the open road an old 
man dressed very meagrely, with slippers open at the 
toes, ragged shirt, and bare head, who lifted his hands 
eloquently, and chanted to the empty landscape: 



i 



wg 



^ 



Pourquoi? Pourquoi? 

This experience was the germ of the poem, "Old 
Pourquoi," written many years later. 

We returned to America in September, and he imme- 
diately went to Chicago and began work as an instructor 
in the English Department of Chicago University. 



28 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

Boston, 
Sept. 17, 1895. 

Dear Rob: 

I reached home yesterday and am stopping 
here a few days to get my books packed, after 
which I shall make my descent on Chicago. I 
should reach the University Friday afternoon or 
Saturday morning next. Can you secure me or 
suggest to me a temporary abiding-place, from 
the vantage shelter of which I may survey the 
field of batde, learn the rudiments of tactic and 
become conversant with the bristling vocabulary 
of arms? 



Will telegraph or write when I decide upon a 
train, but do not take the trouble to be at home 
on my advent. You could leave the suggestion as 
to boarding house prominently posted to catch 
my hungering eye. 

In haste, 

W. V. M. 

39 Commonwealth Ave. 



29 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Josephine Preston Peahody 

My dear Miss Peabody: 

I have put off sending you the verses with the 
na'lve thought of using them for a Hnk between 
the old Cambridge Hfe and this new one. Scoff at 
my superstition, but do not too scornfully entreat 
the pathetic little versicle of a bond-bearer, shiv- 
ering with the double knowledge of the portentous 
mission and his own objective comicality. Cam- 
bridge — mellow and autumnal — begins already 
to take on really mythic colors — to loom sym- 
bolic, under the stress of this relentless prairie 
light and vast featureless horizon. I begin to 
believe that your charge against me of theatrical- 
ity was just — that all my life there in the east 
was a sort of tragi-farce, more or less consciously 
composed, so rudely awake and in earnest is 
everything here. . . . 

I do not know what this place is going to do for 
me, but am sure of its potency — its alchemical 
power to change and transmute. It is appallingly 
ugly for one thing — so ugly that the double cur- 
tain of night and sleep does not screen the aching 
sense. For another thing it is absorbing — crude 
juice of life — intellectual and social protoplasm. 

30 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

Far aloft hovers phantom Poetry, no longer my 
delicate familiar. But I dream of another coming 
of hers, a new companionship more valorous and 
simple-hearted. 

Chicago University 
Sept. 22, 1895. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[Chicago, 
October 2, 1895.] 

Your letter came yesterday, with cheek on the 
smooth cheek of another — a friendlier pair nor 
a tunefuller ever stretched wing together. Riding 
to town on some sort of transfigured chariot that 
whilom was a railway car, I perused them. Rest 
of morning spent shopping in the New Jerusalem, 
walking on golden pavements, and interwarbling 
on the theme of shirts and socks with whatever 
seraphic creatures had found it good that day to 
put on the habit and estate of shop-girls for the 
glory of God and the furtherance of his kingdom. 
Returning, the lake allured me — one topaz. 
Re-reading of letters. Throbbing of the topaz 
heart: opening and shutting of the sunlight: 
bursting to bloom of some sudden impalpable 

31 



SOME LETTERS OF 

enveloping flower of the air, with the scent 
thereof. The twentieth century dates from yes- 
terday, and we are its chosen ; if not as signs set 
in the heavens of its glory, at least as morning 
birds that carolled to it, mindless of the seductive 
and quite palpable worm. 

More later — brutally busy. 

W 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[CmcAGO, 
October 23, 1895.] 
Dear Dan: 

I have so far made but miserly return for that 
bully long letter you wrote in the purpureal flush 
of reconciliation and renascent duality — or let 
me say, and try to think, trinity — with the 
Bard. If you knew the beast Chicago, the paw- 
ing and glaring of it, you would not find me hard 
to forgive. I have been in the condition of the 
Kluger Schneiderlein in the bear-pit: it has taken 
all my frightened dexterity to keep out of the 
jaws of the creature. Now that I have learned its 
ways a trifle, and can make it crack my nuts and 
dance to my fiddling, the first use I make of my 
loosened faculties is to beg forgiveness for past 

32 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

shortcoming, and plead for more letters. I am 
eager to know how you find Dvorak, whether 
New York keys you up or spiritually ham-strings 
you, whether the fair, the chaste, the inexpressive 
She has throbbed out of the circumambient 
nebula; what you and the Muse find to talk about 
under the sheets, now you are decently married 
— of all of which and much more I demand an 
immediate and circumstantial report. 

For my own part I have been having a highly 
exciting time. I have two classes — one of forty, 
the other of twenty — nearly two-thirds of whom 
are girls. Picture my felicity when I inform you 
that far from the frowsy, bedraggled, anemic, 
simpering creatures I anticipated, half of them at 
least are stars. I regret that popular usage should 
have dechromatized the term, for I mean stars 
of the most authentic stellarity and the most 
convincing twinkle. Lecturing before them is like 
a singing progress from Bootes to the Lyre, with 
wayfaring worlds to lift the chorus. At the begin- 
ning I made an honest man*s effort to talk about 
the qualities of style and the methods of descrip- 
tion, but I am a weak vessel. Now I drool bliss- 
fully about God in his world, with occasional 
wadings into spumy Styx and excursions into the 

33 



SOME LETTERS OF 

empyrean. My work has been heavier so far than 
I fondly hoped it would be, and I can see little 
chance ahead for sleeping on Latmos. I experience 
aching diastoles,^ however, and that is the great 
thing to my thinking. To be a poet is a much 
better thing than to write poetry — out here at 
least, watched by these wide horizons, beckoned 
to by these swift streamers of victorious sunset. 
After the fall term my work will be lighter, then 
I shall try a night out, on a bed of lunary. 

I have just had a letter from , air rarified, 

sky greyish, with half-hints of opal and dove's 
breast, a confused twittering from the hedges, not 
unpleasing. Tenuous, but tense, like a harp string 
in the treble. 

W. V. M. 

To Josephine Preston Peabody 

[Autumn, 1895.] 

Tell you about it? Doth the wind know its 

wound, wherefore it groaneth? It is only an 

affliction of the stars, at least this recent bundle 

of pangs; they are of those that eat the hearts 

* A word we had borrowed from physiology — the dilatation 
of the heart in beating — and used as a name for moods of spiritual 
elation. See the Introduction. 

34 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

of crazy-headed comets zigzaging across the 
Zodiac. Doubtless the incontinent closing of the 
moon-flower dailies left me more defenseless 
against these malign astral inroads, but the root of 
the matter is some sort of cosmic apoplexy or 
ear-ache of which I happen to be the centre. 
To Uav has the falling-sickness or the everlasting 
doldrums, and selects me to ache through — that 
is all. If I were not precociously aware of the 
devices of his Celestial Completeness I should 
suppose quite simply that Chicago was boring 
me to death, that my work was meaningless 
drudgery, that the crowd of spiteful assiduous 
nothings that keep me from It (Ah, the vague 
sweet-shrouding mute arch vocable!) were tanta- 
lizing me into stupid rage, and stinging my eye- 
balls into blindness of the light. When in moments 
of weakness I transfer the blame for my inward 
dissatisfaction and disarray to outward things, I 
am on the point of trundling my little instructorial 
droning-gear into Lake Michigan, and stepping 
out west or south on the Open Road, a free man 
by the grace of God, and a tramp by Rachel's 
intercession. But of course I know that I should 
only be changing garments, and that I should 
wake up some fine night and find my hay-stack 

35 



SOME LETTERS OF 

bristling with just such goblin dissension as now 
swarms over my counter-pane. However, it is 
easy to stand dissension. Anything is better than 
that awful hush settling down on everything, as if 
To Uav had suddenly discovered himself to be 
stuffed with sawdust, and lost interest in his own 
ends and appetites. And that silence your brave 
words have scared back. I really begin to think 
you are Wise, and to stand in awe of you. That 
is a more convincing presentment of the "trans- 
scendent identity," that which shows it casting 
its own brain on one side as a worn out accessory, 
holding its own heart in its hands to burn, like 
the angel in Dante's dream. I pay you the com- 
pliment of believing that you would be capable 
of that, and I find it illustrious, and with your 
gracious permission propose to set it for a sign, 
right at a cross-roads where I sometimes skulk 
belated, peering fearful-eyed for Hecate. 

The truth of the matter is, I suppose, that I am 
dissatisfied to the point of desperation with the 
kind of life that is possible out here. I used to 
have days in the east when a hedge of lilac over a 
Brattle Street fence or a strenuous young head 
caught against a windy sweep of sunset on Har- 
vard Bridge, filled me with poignant perceptions 

36 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

of a freer life of sense and spirit, — and I was fre- 
quently vaguely unhappy over it. But after all 
one had n't far to go before finding some refine- 
ment of feeling, some delicate arabesque of con- 
vention, to help make up for the lack of liberty. 
Out here there is even less liberty (because less 
thought) and there is nothing — or next to 
nothing — to compensate. If my lines were cast 
in other places, — even other places in this gigan- 
tic ink-blot of a town — I could make shift to 
enjoy my breath. I should make a very happy 
and efficient peanut- vender on Clark or Randolph 
Street, because the rush and noise of the blood in 
the city's pulse would continually solicit and 
engage me. The life of a motor-man is not without 
exhilarating and even romantic features, and an 
imaginative boot-black is lord of unskirted realms. 
But out here, where there is no city life to gaze at, 
nothing to relieve the gaseous tedium of a mush- 
room intellectuality, no straining wickedness or 
valiant wrestling with hunger to break the spec- 
tacle of Gospel-peddling comfort, — the imagina- 
tion doth boggle at it! 



2>7 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Josephine Preston Peahody 

[Probably Autumn, 1895.] 

Mr. Ruskin would not be happy in Chicago — 
God is a very considerable personage — So is Mr. 
Rockefeller — So am I, but for a different reason 

— Towers of Babel are out of fashion — Ride a 
Rambler — Four fifths of William Blake would 
not be accepted for publication by the Harvard 
Advocate — Life at a penny plain is d — d dear — 
Eat H. O. — The poet in a golden clime was born, 
but moved away early — A man may yearn over 
his little brothers and sisters and still be a good 
Laodicean — Art is not long, but it takes a good 
while to make it short — There will be no opera 
or steel engraving in the twentieth century — An 
angle-worm makes no better bait because it has 
fed on Caesar — Wood fires are dangerous — So 
is life at a penny plain, but for a different reason 

— Towers of Babel, though out of fashion, are 
well received in Chicago — There were no birds 
in the Tower of Babel — God is a very considerable 
personage — So is Olga Nethersole — So are you, 
but for a different reason — I am owner of the 
spheres, and grow land-poor — Literature is a 

38 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

fake and Nordau is its prophet — God bless 
McKinley — Love is not Time's fool: he was 
turned off for lack of wit — Eve was born before 
Ann Radcliffe, so the world goes darkling — 
Tom 's a cold — I am old-rose, quoth 'a — God's 
pittykins 'ield ye, zany, for thy apple-greenness! 
*T would gi' the Ding-an-Sich a colic to set eyes 
on 'e — Natheless Monet was a good painter, and 
color-blind — 

W. V. M. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Dec. I, 1895. 
My dear Dan: 

Day after crowded day I have looked at your 
delightful long letter, and said, in the sweet 
babble of the Little Cricket Thing, ^ that I would 
answer it sooner or later, when I was not as busy 
as hell. Then the speaking lines about your reclin- 
ing on the Paderewskian bosom, arrived, with 
their tantalizing suggestion of dim-lighted rooms, 
transcendentalized rum toddy, and an auroral 
head uttering gold vaticination. I was jaundiced 

1 He refers to the parody by a Harvard friend, already men- 
tioned, of some lines in his song " My love is gone into the East." 
See page xxvii. 

39 



SOME LETTERS OF 

with jealousy for a week, thinking of the fulness 
of your service before the great altars, and the 
wretched scantlings of effort I was permitted 
to give, standing afar off. To tell the truth, I 
have n't the faintest splinter of sympathy for 
the dolorousness of your condition, as set forth in 
your letter. To be a runner of scales and to work 
at canon and fugue by the job, strikes me as the 
most enviable estate of man. Every scale you 
run, every fugue you hammer out, is laying up 
treasure in heaven — not by way of communal 
walls and pavements only, but especially for the 
house which your own winged self-ship shall 
inhabit. I have as much respect for you as for 
a disgruntled peach seed, which should cry out 
against the lack of social opportunities in an 
underground community. And besides the ulti- 
mate satisfaction, there is the daily delight of 
pottering over your tools, trying their edge, 
polishing their surfaces, feeling their delectable 
ponderableness. No, you must go for comfort to 
somebody who does n't have a sense of radiant 
bien-etre in fitting a new pen into a holder. 

Which reminds me that, having a few hours 
last week for ecstatic contemplation of my navel, 
I emitted a more or less piercing yawp there- 

40 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

concerning, in the form of a new treatment of the 
moon theme. ^ I have unfortunately bundled off 
the only copy to the Singer, so that I cannot send 
you the product, but if you are still interested you 
may ask her to pass it on to you. You will no 
doubt find much to dislike in it, but I hope that 
some of it may meet with your approval. You 
will recognize the elements drawn from that unfor- 
gettable night in the fields at Chartres. Having 
temporarily exorcised this particular demon, I 
am losing sleep over a project for a play, dealing 
with a character and a situation which seem to me 
intensely significant and eloquent, that of Slatter, 
the "New Mexico Messiah," who has been doing 
things in Denver of late. But I need not bother 
you with dough still in the kneading.^ 

I am looking forward to some bully good talks 
at Christmas, and some good music at your 
expense, and a bottle of wine wherein we may 
drink to the meek brows of Her and It. Mean- 
while, write. 

Will. 

^ The poem started in Caen the preceding summer. It eventu- 
ally became "Jetsam." 

2 "The Faith Healer" did not, as a matter of fact, take on 
final shape until shortly before its author's death. 

41 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Mary L, Mason 

Chicago, 
Dec. 12, 1895. 

My dear Mrs. Mason, 

You are wofully ignorant of the sweet uses of 
memory if you can picture me forgetting your 
delightful invitation to spend a fraction of my 
Christmas week at your home. . . . 

Whisper it not in Gath, but I hunger and thirst 
after the East with a carnal longing. I thought I 
had relegated all you subtlety-spinning New 
Englanders to the limbo of the effete, where you 
were tolerantly allowed to exist and confuse eco- 
nomic relations only because you are, after all, 
rather nice. But of late, in the still watches, your 
niceness grows luminous and summoning. I still 
disapprove of you, but I want to see you very bad. 

Expectantly, 
William Vaughn Moody. 

To Josephine Preston Peahody 

Chicago, 
Dec. 15 [16?], 1895. 

Just a word to tell you something of the im- 
mense good your letter did me. After I sent off 

42 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

the poem [''Jetsam"], the inevitable revulsion 
set in : I lost faith in it, and then, being in a state 
of nerves, took the easy step of losing faith in 
myself and the future. Still I kept hoping against 
hope that you would find a stray line to like and 
praise. When the days passed, and your silence 
pronounced gentle but final condemnation, I sat 
down and read the lines over. They had fallen 
dead ink. The paper dropped to the floor; I sat, 
elbows on desk and head in hands, and thought. 
I had felt the thing, I had put my best breath into 
the lines, and here they were, not only dead past 
hope, but graceless, repulsive, without the dig- 
nity or pathos of death. What then? For a long 
time I did not have heart squarely to face the 
issue — Life without that hope and solace, that 
pillar of smoke by day and of fire by night, — 
could I live it out so, in some sort of grey content? 
Outside my window the moon came out over the 
turbulent brute groping of the brown surge, walk- 
ing in light as when she tormented the lowered 
eyes of Job, tempting him from Jehovah. She 
called me out with her, miles along the coast, and 
as I stumbled along in the vague light, gradually 
the mere effort I had made to say something of 
her wonder, began to seem its own justification. 

43 



SOME LETTERS OF 

When I came back the pages I gathered from the 
floor were farther than ever from adequacy, but 
somehow I cared for them, as one cares for a dead 
thing one picks up in the hedges, thinking of its 
brave fight for life. Then your letter came, and I 
read, stupidly at first, not understanding, your 
words of generous praise. I knew you were artist 
enough not to utter them merely for friendship's 
sake, and when I understood them, they filled me 
with joy which would have been out of all propor- 
tion to the matter at stake except that for me it 
was one of those mysterious pivotal small things 
on which the future turns silent and large. So you 
had actually liked it all, and were glad it had been 
done? Then it was not dead after all; my eyes 
had been seared? I read it through in the flush of 
pleasure and found it good, — absurdly, ravish- 
ingly good ! So I took a deep breath, and sat down 
to write it over, with the sharp light of remembered 
disillusion on its weaknesses, and the memories of 
my night walk to beckon me on. I shall crave 
judgment on the result at Christmas, for I pur- 
pose to make a descent on Boston then, ravenous 
with a three-month's abstinence from subtlety- 
spinning. ... I have . . . written to 

again. He has owed me a letter since September, 

44 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

but God knows who has the rights of this wretch- 
edness, and of all our funny little Pantheon the 
absurd little god who gets the least of my service 
is the one labelled ** Personal Dignity." I can- 
not think of any personal sacrifice I would not 
make to convince him of my friendship, or rather 
to establish once more the conditions which make 
friendship possible. I hope this does n't sound 
superior; it is not so meant. 

W. V. M. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Dec. 15, 1895. 

1. Shall reach New York . . . Dec. 19. 

2. Shall reach Boston . . . Dec. 26. 

3. Must leave Boston . . . Dec. 31. 

4. Shall leave Boston . . . God knows. 

All except last date subject to change without 
notice. 

W. V. M. 

The hope of a vacation, expressed in the following 
letter in a characteristic metaphor, was illusory. Save 
for a ten-day bicycle trip with Mr. Schevill in the 
following June Moody seems to have stuck close to the 
"shop" for many months. In August he writes that 
he is to work all winter, in order to get a nine-months' 

45 



SOME LETTERS OF 

holiday beginning in the spring. In the letter of 
November 24 he speaks of having had "fourteen con- 
secutive months of hack teaching," a statement which 
was not literally true, but which doubtless seemed true 
to his eager mind, always longing for fruitful leisure, 
fretful under drudgery. He eventually got away, as 
will be seen, in March, 1897. 

To Mrs. C. H. Toy 

Chicago, 
Jan. 6, 1896. 
My dear Mrs. Toy: 

... It seemed very good to see a Cambridge 
face again, especially against this background of 
phantasmagoric ugliness. I long for something 
beautiful to look at with a really agonized and 
fleshly longing. My eye is horny with smoke and 
the outlines of grain elevators. But I must not 
enlarge upon my ''state," since day is at hand. 
Looking up through the murk and the swaying 
shadow of seaweed I can just catch a hint of 
vanishing bubbles and green shattered needles of 
light. Two months more and I shall lift my 
encompassed head above the waters. Then off 
with the diving gear and ho for the groves of 
banyan and of cocoanut, and the little Injuns 
that grow between ! . . . 

46 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Mary L. Mason 

Chicago. 
Jan. II, 1896. 

My dear Mrs. Mason, 

I have postponed writing because I suspected 
you would rather have a letter written com- 
posedly out of a rising desire for talk or its substi- 
tute, than a hurried note setting forth with a 
prim gasp that I had got here with no broken 
bones. I have not quite got accustomed to the 
raw bite of things again, after humoring my skin 
with the delicate eastern impingements. Indeed 
I have been since getting back as helpless a victim 
to the blue devils as it is in my temperament ever 
to be. The gross result of the life one can lead in 
a place like this is satisfactory enough, but the 
net result, the fine slow-oozing crystal distillation, 
is tragically small — and I fancy that for such as 
I the unsublimated mass must always keep a 
disheartening suggestion. The enervating thing 
about the place is its shallow kindness. People 
are so eager to give you credit for virtues that you 
do not possess that you feel ashamed to put forth 
those that are yours. Then when you do take 
heart of grace, and do or say or think a really good 

47 



SOME LETTERS OF 

thing, and win the facile applause, you have a 
bad taste in the mouth to think that any jigster's 
trick would have won you the same magnificent 
triumph. I sigh, like the ancient worthy, for a 
stern friend, one who will not be gulled by any 
thimble-rig sophistry, who will puncture with 
sweet skepticism my little soap-bubble eloquences, 
and by so doing give me heart to try and be wise. 
I recognize of course that the wish is a weak one, 
that I ought to be my own detective, gendarme, 
judge, and hangman; and I have made some 
flabby efforts to execute these functions upon my- 
self, but so far with indifferent success. Do you 
think a wife would do any good? I have cast 
appalled glances at that ultimate rigor of self- 
discipline, but my eyes have been blest by no 
reassuring light. Something I must have to key 
life up, to give it musical pitch and the knit 
coherence of music. If I were free I could get all 
that out of my little gift and great passion for the 
poet's craft, but hampered as I am by intellectual 
drudgery that is only one burden more, and adds 
the last note of poignancy to the tedium of the 
days. I have lately thought with envy amounting 

to wickedness of D 's complete service of the 

thing that seems to him real under the sun : if he 

48 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

were not so dear, I could find it in my heart to 
hate him cordially for it. 

Another thing that afflicts my soul is the deli- 
cate strange winter light that lies over a cer- 
tain hill called Milton, at the rising of the sun 
and the going down thereof, and the tentative 
fluttering talk of a girl who is destined to tread 
much in the lonely places of life and suffer much. 
Fortunately, there is there too the talk of a 
brave woman who sees life clearly and sees it 
whole, and whose verdict is, I am sure, that in 
spite of suffering and lonely places it is worth 
while. 

I have not been able to get the edition of 
Keats's letters that I wanted you to see; I hope 
you will like the little picture which I send in- 
stead. 

Faithfully yours, 

William Vaughn Moody. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Sunday, Jan. 19, 1896. 
Dear Dan, 

The news you send about your wrist is quite 
heart-breaking. I have not written sooner because 
I could not find it in my breast to speak comfort, 

49 



SOME LETTERS OF 

feeling there only rebellion and disgust at the 
world order and its ghastly lack of breeding. How- 
did you precipitate it? I can only fall back on 
thoughts of Schumann and his lame finger or 
whatever it was that spoiled him for concert 
gymnastics, and made him a minstrel in the court 
celestial. At any rate that question of composing 
away from the piano is settled, with a right 
parental emphasis from the slipper of Mischance. 
... I will spare you the usual admonition about 
the rigidity of your upper lip, in spite of the natural 
longing I feel to use the heirloom. 

I have been brutally busy since getting back, on 
Uncle Horace's book,^ so that all my schemes of 
spiritual conquest are done up in moth-balls for 
the time being. . . . One o'clock midnight, and 
the morrow flames responsibility. Hire a type- 
writer — marry one if necessary — and we will 
annihilate space. I have a creature to tell you 
about — but a Creature ! 

W. V. M. 

1 Some editorial work he had undertaken for Mr. Horace 
Scudder. 



50 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Chicago, Feb. i6, 1896. 
Dear Dan: 

I have just heard from your sister-in-law of 
your enforced furlough. I am not going to help 
you curse your luck, knowing your native capa- 
biHties in that direction to be perfectly adequate, 
but my Methodist training urges me to give you 
an epistolary hand-grasp, the purport of which is 
''Keep your sand.'' I could say other things, not 
utterly pharisaical. I could say what I have often 
said to myself, with a rather reedy tremolo per- 
haps, but swelling sometimes into a respectable 
diapason. ''The dark cellar ripens the wine." 
And meanwhile, after one's eyes get used to the 
dirty light, and one's feet to the mildew, a cellar 
has its compensations. I have found beetles of 
the most interesting proclivities, mice altogether 
comradely and persuadable, and forgotten pota- 
toes that sprouted toward the crack of sunshine 
with a wan maiden grace not seen above. I don't 
want to pose as resourceful, but I have seen what 
I have seen. 

The metaphor is however happily inexact in 
your case, with Milton to retire to and Cambridge 

51 



SOME LETTERS OF 

humming melodiously on the horizon. If you can 
only throttle your Daemon, or make him forego 
his leonine admonition "Accomplish," and roar 
you as any sucking dove the sweet vocable " Be," 
— you ought to live. I have got mine trained to 
that, pardee! and his voice grows not untunable. 
I pick up shreds of comfort out of this or that one 
of God's ashbarrels. Yesterday I was skating on a 
patch of ice in the park, under a poverty-stricken 
sky flying a pitiful rag of sunset. Some little 
muckers were guying a slim raw-boned Irish girl 
of fifteen, who circled and darted under their 
banter with complete unconcern. She was in the 
fledgling stage, all legs and arms, tall and adorably 
awkward, with a huge hat full of rusty feathers, 
thin skirts tucked up above spindling ankles, 
and a gay aplomb and swing in the body that was 
ravishing. We caught hands in midflight, and 
skated for an hour, almost alone and quite silent, 
while the rag of sunset rotted to pieces. I have 
had few sensations in life that I would exchange 
for the warmth of her hand through the ragged 
glove, and the pathetic curve of the half-formed 
breast where the back of my wrist touched her 
body. I came away mystically shaken and elate. 
It is thus the angels converse. She was something 

52 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

absolutely authentic, new, and inexpressible, 
something which only nature could mix for the 
heart's intoxication, a compound of ragamuffin, 
pal, mistress, nun, sister, harlequin, outcast, and 
bird of God, — with something else bafflingly 
suffused, something ridiculous and frail and sav- 
age and tender. With a world offering such 
rencontres, such aery strifes and adventures, who 
would not live a thousand years stone dumb? I 
would, for one — until my mood changes and I 
come to think on the shut lid and granite lip of 
him who has had done with sunsets and skating, 
and has turned away his face from all manner of 
Irish. I am supported by a conviction that at an 
auction on the steps of the great white Throne, I 
should bring more in the first mood than the 
second — by several harps and a stray dulcimer. 
I thoroughly envy you your stay at Milton — 
wrist, Daemon, and all. You must send me a 
lengthy account of the state of things in Cam- 
bridge. ... If the wrist forbids writing, employ a 
typewriter of the most fashionable tint — I will 
pay all expenses and stand the breakage. I stipu- 
late that you shall avoid blondes however, they 
are fragile. 

William Vaughn Moody. 
53 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Chicago, April ii, 1896. 
My dear Dan: 

Yesterday morning mint appeared in the 
market windows, and this morning the lake is a 
swoon of silver and blue; — argal, I must write 
you a letter. I have felt for the past two weeks 
as if I had fallen heir to something, owing to 
the fact that spring turns out to be a month 
earlier here than in the east, and she comes over 
the prairies with the naive confidence and sweet 
quick surrender that she has learned from the 
prairie girls. For the first time since your rustica- 
tion I have ceased to envy you your domiciliation 
among the blue hills of Milton, for my side of the 
bubble has swung sunward and what care I if 
it be made of kitchen soap? I walk about in 
an amber clot of sensuousness, and feel the sap 
mount, like a tree. I thought — and often gloom- 
ily asseverated — that I had got over this purring 
rapture at the general situation, legitimately the 
gift of the primitive or the jagged. Well, I did not 
give Nature credit for the virtue that is in her. 

My work, alas, still continues to be hard. I use 
up all my vital energies before the evening loaf 

54 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

comes on, and then have force only for passive 
delights. I stick a good round straw into a cask 
of Spenser or Hardy, and suck myself to sleep — 
to dream of orchards and '' golden- tongued 
Romance with serene lute." The hard bright sun 
of a western morning, with theme classes super- 
imposed, reduces the golden tongue to phantom 
thinness of song and banishes the lute into the 
limbo of the ridiculous, but I plod on evening- 
wards with mole-like assiduity. I have come to 
realize the wonderful resources of passive enjoy- 
ment better than I ever did before — perhaps 
perversely, perhaps according to a mere instinct 
of self-preservation against the hurry and remorse- 
less effectiveness of life out here. Whatever the 
cause, I have found out how good a thing it is to 
be a silly sheep and batten on the moor, to stand 
in cool shallows and let the water go by and the 
minnows dart and the brook moss stretch its 
delicate fingers. Also I seem to be coming, half 
through disappointed effort and half through this 
same effortlessness, to discern more clearly what 
is worthy in human motive and admirable in 
human achievement. It is not that I love Shake- 
speare less, but that I love Ophelia more. 

W. V. M. 

55 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

May i6, 1896. 

Dear Dan: 

Your letter came this morning in time to give 
me a goodly fit of the blues, thinking of Milton 
in spring, and thence by easy derivation of all 
the other excellencies from which my exiled feet 
are held. I can't repay the pang, but as the near- 
est thing to a heavenly affliction which I can com- 
mand I send you a poem which I have just written 
about the Creature I once hinted to you of — a 
Girl who haunted the symphonies last winter. I 
hope you will like it, because it is almost the first 
thing I have done which has been a direct impulse 
from ''real" life, and you know I have theories 
about that. Also what I tried to say is a thing 
which constitutes much of the poetry of a young 
man's life, I think, and if I could have got it said 
would have had a certain large interpretive value. 
Let me know your opinion, at as great length as 
your nerves and your nurse will permit. 

Will. 



56 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

WILDING FLOWER 

Tonight her lids shall lift again 

Slow-soft with vague desire, 

And lay about my breast and brain 

Their hush of lilac fire, 

And I shall take the sweet of pain 

As the laborer his hire. 

And while the happy viols shake, 

Under the paltry roof, 

The web of singing worlds they make 

To shelter Heaven aloof, 

Our listening hearts shall build and break 

Love's sempiternal woof. 

O! listening heart, with all thy powers 

Of white beatitude. 

What is the dearest of God's dowers 

To the children of his blood? 

Where blow the lovesome wilding flowers 

In the hollows of his wood? 



That, though her ear hath never caught 
The name men call me by, 

57 



SOME LETTERS OF 

That, though my lot from her sweet lot 
Lyeth as sky from sky, 
And my fain lonely hand dare not 
Touch hers for comradery, — 

Yet her shy devious lambent soul 

With my slow soul should walk, 

That linked like lovers we should stroll 

By rivers of glad talk, 

Or bow to the music's wind-control 

As stalk by the lily stalk; 

Yet never break, with a fooFs mean waste, 

The bubble of dream sky, 

All gorgeous runnelled, window-spaced, 

With blaze of drifted dye, — 

This is a happiness to taste 

Life's farthest meanings by. 

The flushed adventurous violins 
Climbing the crudded mist, 
The clear horn calling when it wins 
Its tower noon-precipiced. 
The aching oboe throat that twins 
Night's moonward melodist, 
58 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

Shall find naught in the heavens of air 

That they may name beside 

The rhythmic joyance she doth wear 

Whether she go or bide, 

The wood-pool lustres of her hair, 

Or her lip's wistful pride. 

Oath-graven and heart-historied 

Shall be our marriage ring, 

Though oath of dead to sheeted dead 

Be a louder spoken thing; 

My sign shall be upon her head 

While stars do meet and sing. 

Not. such a sign as women wear 
Who bow beneath the shame 
Of marriage insolence, and bear 
A house- wife's faded name; 
Nor such as passion eateth bare 
With its carcanet of flame; 

Nor such a sign as happy friend 
Sets on his friend's dear brow, 
When meadow pipings break and blend 
To a key of subtle woe. 
And the orchard says play-time 's at end, 
Best unclasp hands and go. 
59 



SOME LETTERS OF 

But where she strays, in blight or blooth, 

One fadeless flower she wears, 

A mystic gift God gave my youth, 

Whose petals dim are fears, 

Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, 

Hesitancies and tears. 

O! heart of mine, with all thy powers, 

Of strange beatitude. 

What is the dearest of God's dowers 

To the children of His blood? 

Where blow the lovesome wilding flowers 

In the hollows of His wood? 

William Vaughn Moody. 
May, 1896. 

The revised form of this poem, printed in the 
"Poems" of 1 90 1, is as follows: — 

HEART'S WILD FLOWER 

To-night her lids shall lift again, slow, soft, with 

vague desire. 
And lay about my breast and brain their hush of spirit 

fire. 
And I shall take the sweet of pain as the laborer his 

hire. 

60 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

And though no word shall e'er be said to ease the 

ghostly sting, 
And though our hearts, unhoused, unfed, must still 

go wandering. 
My sign is set upon her head while stars do meet and sing. 

Not such a sign as women wear who make their fore- 
heads tame 

With life's long tolerance, and bear love's sweetest, 
humblest name, 

Nor such as passion eateth bare with its crown of 
tears and flame. 

Nor such a sign as happy friend sets on his friend's 

dear brow 
When meadow-pipings break and blend to a key of 

autumn woe, 
And the woodland says playtime's at end, best unclasp 

hands and go. 

But where she strays, through blight or blooth, one 

fadeless flower she wears, 
A little gift God gave my youth, — whose petals dim 

were fears, 
Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesitancies, and tears. 

O heart of mine, with all thy powers of white beatitude. 
What are the dearest of God's dowers to the children 

of his blood? 
How blow the shy, shy wilding flowers in the hollo-A's 

of his wood ! 

6i 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

May 24, 1896. 
Dear Dan: 

Thanks for your painstaking and very percep- 
tive criticism. I cannot bring myself yet to accept 
all your strictures unconditionally, but I find them 
all suggestively and wisely hortatory, pointing the 
way where the real pitfalls lie for me ; and I know 
that by the time I come to put the verses in per- 
manent form I shall have accepted most of them 
literally. Still, while I am still unpersuaded, let 
me distinguish. The vague syntax of st. 11 is 
undoubtedly mere slovenliness: the stanza shall 
go the way of the ungirt loin. Also st. vil is as 
you say turgid, and must go, even though it drag 
with it the next stanza, which you like. As regards 
the suspension of the sense in sts. iv-vi I cannot 
agree. It seems to me that the breathlessness and 
holding-aloof is justified by the emphasis with 
which the concluding thought is thus given, and 
still more by the fact that it sets the essential 
thought off in a rounded form. It has a construc- 
tive value, also, as contrasting with the simple 
declaratory forms of statement which precede 
and follow it. I fancy it corresponds in my mind 

62 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

somewhat to an ''organ-point" in yours. The 
adjectives are too many, I know; but I am a 
little cold-blanketed and worried over your spe- 
cific objections to phrase. " Paltry roof " is paltry, 
I freely admit; "wind-control" and "moonward 
melodist" are rococo as hell. But the other three 
to which you take exception I am sure are good 
poetry. ... I think — pardon the egotism of 
the utterance (you would if you knew what tears of 
failure have gone to water the obstreperous little 
plant) — I think you are not tolerant enough of 
the instinct for conquest in language, the attempt 
to push out its boundaries, to win for it continu- 
ally some new swiftness, some rare compression, 
to distill from it a more opaline drop. Is n't it 
possible, too, to be pedantic in the demand for 
simplicity? It's a cry which, if I notice aright, 
nature has a jaunty way of disregarding. Com- 
mand a rosebush in the stress of June to purge 
itself; coerce a convolvulus out of the paths of 
catachresis. Amen! 

W. V. M. 

Please be good-natured and talk back. Or no, 
don't. Spare the arm. 



63 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[Chicago, 
June 23, 1896.] 
Dear Dan: 

The report which you make of your lack of 
progress in health casts a gloom over my days. 
I am about starting for Wisconsin for a week's 
bicycling, and the monstrous egoism of bodily 
vigor which I feel, possesses my soul with shame. 
The thing for you to do is to come to Chicago: 
it is the greatest health resort going — mirahile 
dictu. We live on bicycling, base-ball, breezes, 
beer, and buncombe, and keep right chipper 
mostly. Can't you come out for a while? We have 
an extra bed-room, and if you can stand bachelor 
shiftlessness after the golden calm of Milton 
housekeeping, we could put you up "snugly.'* 
The quotation marks are only a warning as to the 
point of view. Expense need be no deterrent. 
Walking is good all the way, and hand-outs rich 
and plentiful. Think of it seriously. We will send 
you back mens sana surely and sano corpore if we 
have luck. Allons! 

I have grown quite meek over the verses, as I 
thought I should. I accept your strictures on the 

64 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

suspended construction, with only the lingering 
spiteful affirmation that two persons to whom I 
read the poem seemed to find far less difficulty in 
following the syntax than you assert as normal. 
The alternative explanations of the discrepancy 
in judgment are both too disagreeable to pursue. 
At worst it is only one more failure ; success only 
looms a little haughtier, a little more disdainful 
of conquest. Esperance and set on! 

I have had an enormous little adventure since 
I wrote last. Another Girl, of course. This time 
a Westerner par excellence — a Californian, dating 
mentally from the age of Rousseau and Chateau- 
briand, with geysers and cloud bursts of romanti- 
cism, not to say sentimentality; dating spiritually 
from the Age of Gold, or some remoter purity, 
some Promethean dawn, some first foam-birth in 
hyperborean seas. She likes Gibson's drawings, 
adores Munsey's, and sings "Don't be Cross, 
Dear" with awful unction. After this you will 
not believe me when I say that she gave me the 
most unbearable shiver of rapture at the recogni- 
tion of essential girlhood that I for a long time 
remember. Well, have you ever slept under the 
same roof with such a person, in the country, and 
wakened at that moment before dawn when in 

65 



SOME LETTERS OF 

the "spectral uncompounded light" the spirit Is 
least capable of defense, when it feels only a 
membrane separating it from the shock of joy 
and woe as they stream from the passionate day- 
spring, and have you felt the sense of that com- 
mon shelter like a caress, heard through walls and 
doors the rise and fall of her breast as an ineffable 
rhythm swaying the sun? If you have you can 
realize the gone feeling that possessed me when 
she said (interpreting my own gloomy guess) that 
my kind was not her kind, that my language was 
not her language, and that her soul could only be 
studious to avoid mine, as the bird flying south- 
ward in spring avoids the hunter. I bowed assent 
and came home. I now nurse memories and grow 
elegiac. Come to Chicago! 

W. V. M. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

Chicago, 
July 14, '96. 

T turned up bright and early for his fifteen 



dollars, and continues to pay us little friendly 
visits from time to time. He now has his eye on 
the Civil Service. The Civil Service has not yet 

66 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

got its eye on him, but may in the fullness of 
time. . . . 

It has been unspeakably hot — life a tragedy 
and a tongue-lolling — flat 7 a place of penance, 
teaching a Dantesque farce. Pray for us, thou 
godless happy Loafer. 

Please give my kindest regards to Ida. I have 
for many weeks had it in my mind to try to phrase 
my gratitude for her very bully tolerance of our 
loudnesses and other iniquities this winter. Some 
day I shall, believe me; I speak with the arrogance 
of the professional rhetorician in daily need of 
defence against an inner conviction that he is the 
dumbest of God's creatures. 

W. V. M. 

To Josephine Preston Peabody 

Chicago, July 17, 1896. 

I find that the West cries out as with one voice 
for the feathers and furbelows of feeling that you 
Cambridge mode-makers consigned to the garret 
decades ago. They 're a little bedraggled at times, 
but we wear them with an air! Rousseau would 
weep over us — Chateaubriand would call us 
brother. I wonder if Rousseau and Chateaubri- 

67 



SOME LETTERS OF 

and were as ridiculous after all as they seem from 
the serene middle of Harvard Square? 

All this is of course (I mean this sentimentaliz- 
ing and toy-sea-sailing) by way of "compelling 
incident." That is the most illuminating and 
fruitful phrase you ever gave me. Every hour 
that I pilfer from tedium I thank the lips that 
framed it. Alas! the better ways of gilding the 
grey days slip from me. Apollo has gone a-hunt- 
ing and I was n't asked. I have hung my harp 
on a willow, where it gathers rust and caterpillars 
with a zeal it lacked in a better cause. I am gone 
stark dumb. I rap myself and get a sound of 
cracked clay. A white rage seizes me at times, 
against the pottering drudgery that has fastened 
its lichen teeth on me and is softening down my 
" crisp cut name and date." I echo poor Keats's 
cry "O for ten years that I may steep myself in 
poetry" — with the modest substitution of weeks 
for years, and a willingness to compromise on as 
many days if Providence will only undertake to 
get this shiny taste of themes and literary drool 
out of my mouth, and let me taste the waters of 
life where they are near the well-head. To go a- 
brook-f olio wing — O happiness, O thou bright 
Denied! W. V. M. 

68 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[Chicago, 
July 20, 1896.] 
Dear Dan: 

The confident tone of your last letter puts me 
in conceit with life again. Envisage the theme job 
with the comic or the tragic mask, as you please, 
but not with the features sweet Nature gave you 
— on your life. I am known in the Chicago 
themery as the Man in the Iron Mask, and you 
may wager I live up to the title. The chance of 
luring you out here in August tempts me to lie 
goldenly about the musical prospects. Now that 
I have the strength I hasten feebly to falter that 
they are damn poor. Not that Chicago is not 
*' musical" — it is amazingly and egregiously so. 
Calliope is the one Muse we recognize, and she 
has a front spare bedroom and unlimited pie. 
But the place is overrun with music teachers — 
chiefly foreign — whereof I find recorded the 
names of unbelievable thousands. The Univer- 
sity does not yet boast a Department of Music, 
though one hears rumors of millions ripe to drop 
at the summons of One Elect. If you feel the star 
quite distinct above your brows, you might prac- 

69 



SOME LETTERS OF 

tice crooking your little finger with the proper 
imperial persuasion. 

You don't tell me anything about people. I 
have become a frowsy gossip, and cannot live 
without my pill of personalities sweetly com- 
pounded. To punish you for the neglect I enclose 
a reaction on a recent notable Experience. Hire 
an amanuensis for seven hours and talk out a 
sufficing bundle of pages on the mystical diff"er- 
ences between This and That, and send the bill 
along with the bundle. 

Will. 

P.S. Before reading my poor little reaction, 
do me the justice to abstract yourself for twelve 

hours from the society of , — to whom, by 

the way, I send my warmest regards. I have 
just enjoyed his article in the Chap Book. 

The "reaction on a recent notable Experience" here 
referred to was rejected by Moody when he came to 
make up the "Poems" of 1901 — for what reason is 
not very evident. Mrs. Moody says that he felt that 
"The Golden Journey" made it superfluous. The 
style of the two poems is doubtless somewhat similar, 
but "Dawn Parley" has a simple directness and a 
poignancy that the other lacks. At any rate there can 
be no harm in reprinting it here as an excellent example 
of its author's earlier manner. 

70 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

DAWN PARLEY 

I WOKE Upon the edge of day, 
The east was wild with racing light, 
All meek and wild my spirit lay 
Star-shaken with delight. 

I said, "This moment she doth wake 
Within the chamber next but one, 
She sees the morning-glory shake 
Its trumpets to the sun." 

A bird that had his headstrong say 
Outside my casement, frilled and went; 
All wild and wan my spirit lay 
With sudden anguish rent. 

For yesternight I laid my brain 
And all my soul's dim banded powers 
Open to her, who said, *"T is plain 
Thy ways are none of ours." 

"Though nobly good to thine and thee. 
To us thy ways are strange and drear; 
I go with my sweet friends to be. 
And thou must tarry here." 
71 



SOME LETTERS OF 

Above the hurry of the light 
All meek and wild my spirit hung, 
From the far hills I scared the night 
And in the zenith sung, 

"O! playmates of her heedless hours, 
Her eyes ye nevermore may see : 
My brain and all my soul's dim powers 
Possess her utterly." 

W. V. M. 
July i8, 1896. 

To Mrs, C. H. Toy 

[Chicago, August 11, 1896.] 
As for Chicago, I find that it gives me days or 
at least hours of broad-gauge Whitmanesque 
enthusiasm, meagrely sprinkled over weeks of 
tedium. The tedium is not of the acid-bath sort, 
however. Genuinely, I feel mellower, deeper- 
lunged, more of a lover of life, than I have ever 
felt before, and the reason is that I have had long 
somnolent spaces in which to feel the alchemy of 
rest. I am writing, not much, but with time 
enough to listen for the fairy echoes, to turn and 
taste again, to fix and prefer. I shall never have a 
lordly shelf-full of books to point to (''Paint my 

72 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

two hundred pictures, some good son!") but if I 
live out the reasonable span, I think I can hope 
to have one little one at least, or two maybe, 
v/hich will be in their own way vocal from cover to 
cover. Whether the voice will be one that people 
will care to hear, matters less to me than it did — 
perhaps less than it should. Safely stowed in my 
gum-cell, with my globule of amber honey, I find 
it easy to forget Leviathan and his egregious 
spou tings. He begins to seem the least bit comical, 
Leviathan, from the gum-cell outlook. The fact 
that we and our cell could hang unobserved on 
one of his eyelashes, does n't negate our import- 
ance in the least. . . . 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

Chicago, August i6, 1896. 
Dear Rob: 

The Morgenthau message was, as you with 
characteristic charity surmise, of friendly import. 
It is only natural that the terse impassioned 
utterance of great minds under stress, should have 
floored the telegraph operator. Hard luck that 
your summer should have got away from you 
with so little to show in the way of essentials — 

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SOME LETTERS OF 

by which I do not need to say I mean alluvial 
soaks and happy drools, rather than land travel 
and seafaring. 

Chicago has been a woe and a bitterness this 
summer. Both Ferd and I hate the shop and all it 
contains with a physical hatred. We are looking 
for the man who said the summer was cool and a 
good time to work. . . . 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[Chicago, 
August 27, 1896.] 
Dear Dan: 

So far from considering your letter "merely 
silly" I found it really stirring — at least after I 
got over my amusement, which you must grant 
to the weakness of the flesh. The chief reason why 
I have not replied sooner is (prepare to be shocked 
beyond speech) that I have been trying to make 
up my mind which side has the least injustice and 
unwisdom to its account in this matter. Living 
here in the heart of the debtor's country I have 
come to see that the present regime cannot possi- 
bly endure. Free silver is undoubtedly a desper- 
ate remedy — perhaps an insane one ; but the slow 
asphyxiation which the vast farming population 

74 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

of the West is undergoing from the appreciation 
of deferred payments on their gigantic mortgage 
debt, due to the inadequacy of the maximum 
gold coinage to keep pace with the growth of 
values — calls for immediate relief of some sort. 
I have seriously thought, had indeed before you 
wrote seriously thought, of doing a little stump- 
ing during the fall vacation, but on which side my 
voice and vote will fall is still a matter of debate 
with me. This is the utmost abyss and downward 
of my recreancy. 

I envy you your feverish and on-the-whole 
delightful visitings with a poisonous tin-green 
envy. I have about got my mouth full of western 
heartiness and uniplexity, and long for the lands 
of purple haze and wicked goat-shanks of apo- 
thegm footing it after the shy fluttered robes of 
dryad metaphor. Abbott Thayer must be a daisy : 
tell me about him. O to walk in a far 
sweeter country, among dim many-colored 
bushes! O now to drink a brown drop of happi- 
ness with my good friend ! Selah ! 

I note with grief the catalogue of black-prowed 
ships the Gods have winged with disaster against 
your spirit's Troy. Anxious counting will not 
seem to make them fewer. I would urge you 

75 



SOME LETTERS OF 

again to brave the blustering rigors of the west, 
if it did not seem such abandoned selfishness to do 
so. For me to go East now would not only be to 
"break a trace," but to break for a hasty feast the 
little pot of honey I have stored up by much 
noon-day toil to serve for a long long starveling 
joy next summer and the winter after. I shall 
only be able to pull through the winter on the 
prospect of nine months of golden liberty at the 
end — the epithet being, let me hasten to add, 
notably metaphorical. 

The Singer refuses to comfort my exile with so 
much as a shed feather of song. My letters lie 
unanswered and my tear-bottles cumber the 
Dead-Letter Office. Wherefore are these thusly? 
Ah me, to walk in a country of dim many-colored 
bushes, beside bright-breathing waters! To hear 
the shy bird that woke at evening in the breast 
of my friend ! Selah. 

I was glad to hear you liked the Atlantic article. 
I am in a state of rawness and jealousy when praise 
of even a pot-boiler makes me lick the hand of 
the giver. Desperate is the pass of all little Gods 
who say after the sixth day, ''This is my handi- 
work, and lo, it is mostly Lolly-pop!" 

Divinely yours, W. V. M. 

76 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Josephine Preston Peahody 

August 30 [1896?]. 

Are n't you ever going to speak to me again? 
Is my back-yard left irremediably desolate? Have 
your rag dolls and your blue dishes said inexorable 
adieu to my cellar-door? The once melodious 
rain-barrel answers hollow and despairing to my 
plaints — but for that the summer is mute. 
What have I done? What have I left undone? 
Alas, these questions are the ancient foolishness 
of the Rejected. Forgive me that the rejected are 
foolish, but tell me my sin. But a little while ago 
you were my intercessor with one whom I had 
inscrutably offended, and now you visit upon my 
head inscrutable doom. Imagine the panic of a 
spider who has anchored his web to the pillars of 
the firmament and discovers of a sudden that they 
are the spokes of a bicycle in active requisition. 
Such a one so smote me yesterday with his alle- 
gory that I plucked him, silky ruin and all, from 
his fool's paradise, and deposited him among the 
comfortable rafters. Will you be outdone in 
charity? My web is a sight — and Messieurs the 
flies, once my toothsome prey, beleaguer me, 
buzzing annihilation. W. V. M. 

77 



SOME LETTERS OF 

Categorically, I crave answer to the following 
questions : — 

1. Where are you to be next year? 

2. What are you going to do there? 

3. Where have you been this summer? 

4. What did you do there? 

5. What are your latest opera? (a ms. copy of 
same should accompany reply.) 

6. What are your contemplated opera? (May 
be omitted for cause.) 

7. Are you happy? 

8. Are you well? 

9. Are you still friends? 

N.B. Please answer the questions in the order 
given. Use only plain idiomatic English. You 
will be judged by both the quality and the quan- 
tity of your writing. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Chicago, 
November 24, 1896. 
Dear Dan: 

So far from being able to " dartle a ray of poesy " 
into your world, I contrast the vivid glow of that 
world as set forth in your letter, with the kennel 
I inhabit, in a spirit of blank misgiving. Fourteen 

78 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

consecutive months of hack teaching^ have left 
me in a state of spiritual beggary I never dreamed 
of, and the seven months that still roll their 
vermiform length before me sometimes startle me 
into a Bedlam query. The uncourageous truth 
must be told, that I have got already to the lees 
of my resisting power, and at the best can only 
crawl stricken and tolerated to the latter end. 
The spirit of selection, the zest of appropriation, 
is gone out of me. For a more instant misery, I 
must give up my Christmas trip east, to which 
my rheumy eyes have long been straining for 
light. A new course to read for, and a pinching 
poverty, are the main reagents in this stinking 
bit of chemistry ; at the black bottom of the retort 
lieth Little Willy's calcined pebble of a heart. 
Sing a song of willow. Strew on him sawdust, 
sawdust, with never a hint of goo. Convey a poor 
devil's plangent gratitude to your mother and 
your sister-in-law for their offered hospitality. 
This reminds me — how did Mrs. Milton Mason 
get it into her head that she had offended me? 
Let her know that in my present state, perhaps 
in any state, a snub or a cufifing from her likes 
would be unto me as rarest hydromel, since after 

^ That is, since October, 1895. 

79 



SOME LETTERS OF 

all even a snub or a cuffing constitutes a sort of 
bond. The blue beatitude of those Milton hills 
often yearns into the grey drift over Chicago 
roofs, and I hear thence, even in the midst of 
cable-car-gongs and elevator chains, a spectral 
hymnody. . . . 

Your statement of your musical condition fills 
me with sorrow and wrath. Your letter reached 
me just as I was starting for the Friday afternoon 
Symphony rehearsal, and darkened for me this 
one flower of passion and color that still blooms 
where the city of my soul once was. But in the 
midst of a Schumann thing my eye wandered to 
the program and read there the story of his being 
turned by just such a misfortune as yours into the 
work which was so gloriously his to do. Of course 
you know the story, but I could hardly help 
sitting down at once and calling upon you, be- 
seeching you to think of it again. For you to give 
up music for "letters " is for an oyster to renounce 
pearl-making in order to devote its energies to 
the composition of sea-weed pills. I hasten to 
add that this is n't saying a damn against the 
pills. . . . 

W. V. M. 



80 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Mary L. Mason 

Chicago. 
Jan. 14, 1897. 
My dear Mrs. Mason, — 

Believe me, I was not nearly so unheedful of 
your Song of the Milton hills, as my silence has 
seemed to say. The two or three days which I 
spent at your house, with those hills for back- 
ground, taught me their power of saying "Be still 
and know.'* Those few days stand out with a 
singular lustre — no, that is hardly the word — 
with a quality, a timbre, which often surprises me 
with its recurrence and residence. Please don't 
suspect me of "registering sensations," but this 
mysterious wilfulness of the memory in aggran- 
dizing this experience and annulling that, out of 
all reason and proportion so far as one can judge 
from the outside, often sets me wondering who is 
boss of me, anyhow. Whoever he is, in this par- 
ticular instance I submit cheerfully to his dictum. 

As Dan may have told you I have been liv- 
ing a rather shrouded existence of late, owing to 
many circumstances which are hardly worth 
retailing one by one, but which in the mass make 
up a very respectable incubus. My term of dur- 

81 



SOME LETTERS OF 

ance in the academic stocks, however, has been 
sensibly shortened: I expect to get on to Boston 
before the end of April, to meet some of God's 
people once more before setting out for God's 
country. Is n't it singular that really good humans 
all seem like emigres, trying bravely but rather 
forlornly to persuade themselves that the land of 
their adoption is the land of Heart's Desire? By 
which sapient query you can gauge the state of 
my nervous reservoirs: a whining sentimentality 
such as that can only be excused or accounted for 
by the nigh yawning of the ineloquent tomb. 

I will not try to thank you for your multiplied 
kindnesses, of which your letter was not the least. 
Always earnestly yours, 

William Vaughn Moody. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[Chicago, 
Feb. 23, 1897.] 
Dear Dan: 

Your letter arouses my conscience from the 
daze into which I some months ago drugged and 
sand-bagged it in order that it might not interfere 
with the performance of meaner but more press- 
ing duties than the ones it clamored of. I have 

82 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

treated my friends shamefully, though every day 
I see more clearly that they are the principal 
thing, and that without them, or at least without 
the sense of them in the background, life would 
be but, as we are informed on good authority it is, 
a Vale of Tears. I have been rather ashamed to 
write for one thing, for fear of revealing my 
barrenness, but if one hath only a clout to his 
breech should he therefore hide him forever in a 
dog-hutch ? Thus spake Zarathustra. This quarter 
I have been held down to business with particular 
attentiveness on the part of the divine chastener 
of my spirit : besides my theme work I have been 
giving a course in the seventeenth century poets, 
reading in them all night and writing lectures on 
them all day. Good fun, and I have made some 
rare finds — of which expect to hear more anon — 
but rather hard on one's tire. I hasten to assure 
you that I am as yet unpunctured, though much 
worn at the rim, and rapidly losing resiliency 
through leakage. I relinquish the figure with 
reluctance. . . . 

I can't tell yet whether I shall get on to Boston 
before sailing. I fear not, as I can get very cheap 
rates east on the Baltimore and Ohio, and my 
steamer (Anchor Line to Naples) is apt to up and 

83 



SOME LETTERS OF 

sail any old day after I get away from here, thus 
making the extra trip to Boston a very hurried 
one at best. Moreover, in my present tan-bark 
state of soul I should be as dull to you as I am to 
myself. In any case I shall stop for a week or ten 
days on my return in the fall, when I shall be 
trailing clouds of glory of the most diapered 
design, and when, moreover, the tennis will be 
ripe enough to pull, to say nothing of country 
walks and things. 



To Josephine Preston Peabody 

Harvard Club, 27 West 44th St. 
March 26, 1897. 
My dear Friend: 

Now that I have at last emerged from darkness 
a riveder le stelle, I turn to you as Dante to Casella, 
and beg at least a word to prove that Florence 
still has true hearts. I am still rather numb as to 
brain and drab-colored as to soul, but I can feel 
the holy influences that wait upon him who loafs 
beginning to purge me and urge me, though I 
tremble to say so for fear of frightening back 
their shy inquiring tentacles. The thought of six 
whole months of acquaintance with myself fills 

84 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

me with an inexpressible arrogance, the likes of 
which I did n't suspect my meek pedagogical 
make-up of. I had promised myself for a long 
time a few days tarry in Boston before sailing, 
but got caught as usual between the contracting 
prongs of time and space. So, instead of the long 
afternoon or afternoons during which I had hoped 
to rummage the past and peer into the future 
with you, here I am with a half -hour and a sheet 
of paper. Nevertheless, that will suffice for the 
cardinal question — How is it with you? What is 
the news from the Niche? Won*t you tell me, 
through the medium of Messrs. Whitby and Co., 
5 Via Tornabuoni, Florence? 

W. V. M. 

During the six months' trip to Italy and the Austrian 
Tyrol that Moody now made, he wrote ''Good Friday 
Night" and the "Road Hymn for the Start," and 
began work on the "Masque of Judgment." He 
returned to Chicago in September, 1897, and under- 
took, in addition to his teaching, at the suggestion of 
Mr. Horace E. Scudder, whom he refers to as "Uncle 
Horace," the editing of the Cambridge Edition of 
Milton's Poetical Works. 



85 



SOME LETTERS OF 



To Ferdinand Schevill 

Casa Frollo, Giudecca. 
Venice, June 8th, '97. 
Dear Ferd: 

I have put off writing to you from day to day, 
partly by reason of the manifold demands which 
Venice makes on one's powers of sensation and 
utterance, but principally by reason of the delay 
which my intimate connections with the patrician 
houses of Milan failed to prevent in the forward- 
ing of my negatives. Here they are at last, such 
ones as I have got printed: rejoice over them 
duly. 

I have been installed in the Casa Frollo with 
the Lovett family for two weeks, and many 
blessings have been showered upon us. Foremost 
to be mentioned among Heaven's gifts is a gar- 
den, green and voiceful, reaching back through 
checkered vistas to the Lagoon — a regularly 
bang-up place of dalliance. Lacketh as yet a 
laughing Lalage; as yet, I repeat, not without a 
sinking at the heart. Meanwhile Euterpe floats 
at the ends of the vineyard alleys, elusive, promis- 
ing. The Good-Friday theme has taken shape; 

86 





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WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

it proved more modest in scope in the working 
out than I had anticipated, but I am almost satis- 
fied with it nevertheless. I hope you may not 
frown upon it, when in the fullness of time it is 
chanted before you. I am at work now on a 
rather hopelessly fantastic thing, I fear, half- 
lyric, half-dramatic; I shall try to excuse the wil- 
fulness of the form by calling it a Masque. The 
subject is the Judgment-day — no less — a kind 
of sketchy modern working over of the theme, 
from the point of view of the accusing human. 
God Almighty promises to be an engaging figure, 
with proper foreshortening. The protagonist is 
the archangel Raphael, a staunch humanist (his 
enemies — Heaven confound their counsels! — 
would say a sentimentalist), and principal roles 
are sustained by such pleasing characters as the 
Seventh Lamp of the Throne, the Angel of the 
Pale Horse, the Lion of the Throne, and the 
Spirit of the Morning-star. I foresee great possi- 
bilities, — a kind of Hebrew Gotterdammerung, 
with a chance for some real speaking-out-in- 
meeting — hoop-la! — Excuse my barbaric yawp; 
it is merely meant to express enthusiasm. 

We keep a gondola-slave, and make frequent 
trips to the Lido, which however is dull as yet. 

87 



SOME LETTERS OF 

The weather grows hot and heavy apace ; I fear 
we shall have to make a break for the mountains 
before long. 

W. V. M. 

To Josephine Preston Peahody 

Cortina d'Ampezzo, 
Tyrol, July 15, 1897. 

My dear Miss Josephine Preston Peabody: 
I have not answered your unfriendly and inade- 
quate letter sooner because I found myself incap- 
able of mustering the amount of ill-feeling which 
I judged commensurate with the demands of a 
reply. I have, indeed, given up all hope of such 
a strenuous accession, and have resolved merely 
to hide the fountains of my good will under a 
decent covering of recrimination, throwing my 
human longing for retaliation to the winds. I am 
the more moved to measures of pacification be- 
cause, in the first place, my return to New England 
shores has grown suddenly more imminent, and 
in the second, because I hear news of noble Works 
taking shape and soul under your hands. It is now 
nearly three weeks since I fled here to this sky- 
hung, cloud-acquainted village of the Austrian 

88 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

Tyrol from the too generous ardors of an Italian 
summer. I am moved to harrow your literary 
sensibilities with ''description" of these wind- 
swept valley pastures, hedged in by ferocious 
peaks, and dowered, even to the border of the 
snow, with unimaginable wealth of wild bloom. 
Tremble not, I will not maltreat a captive of 
courtesy. To tell the ignoble truth, as my time of 
liberty draws to an end, and I see how very little 
I have accomplished in it, I find myself trying 
to shut out sensations which are too poignant and 
crowding, in order that I may find the restfulness 
necessary for work. I have arrived at a depth of 
miserliness where it is possible for me to give up 
a night in the star-lit grass for a night of lamp-oil 
and muddy ink. Not that I have done much, or 
shall, I fear; but I have a good thing to do, when 
it pleases Apollo. I have just had a letter from 
Uncle Horace, making propositions — messes of 
pottage: it is the reek and fatness thereof which 
draws my Esau-soul homeward before its ap- 
pointed time — perhaps. 

W. V. M. 

Address, care Whitby and Co. 
5 Via Tornabuoni, Florence. 



89 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Albergo d'Espagna, Via Calzaioli, 
Florence, August i, 1897. 
Dear Dan: 

When I found in the batch of letters awaiting 
me here this morning one from you, remorse, long 
dozing, awoke and gnawed. I have been a monster 
of taciturnity and greedy possession; I have lain 
on my gorgeous heap of sensation like Fafnir on 
the Glittering Hoard, growling from my papier- 
machS throat to all importunate duties and memo- 
ries, "Lass mich fiihlen! Ich lieg und besitze." 
As I count over my rosary of Italian days — and 
nights ! — with the little seed pearls and the 
pearls of price and the green gawdies, a sense of 
profound pity for everybody else in the world 
invades my breast, — now at least when the 
imminent prospect of a return to the key of drab 
sends over me a sense of moral realities once more. 
The substance of your letter as well as its tone 
precipitates this floating compassion about your- 
self, a reaction of the spiritual chemistry for 
which you will doubtless thank me as little as I 
should you in a reversed case. That your arm 

does not pick up, that 's beard has again been 

90 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

known to stick out straight, that laughs a 

hyena laugh before relapsing into ambrosial 
silence, to say nothing of your estrangement from 
the mint julep and its realms of gold — all to- 
gether constitute a desolating picture — so deso- 
lating indeed that I hesitate to communicate a 
plan I had formed for spending the month of 
September in Boston. The only scrap of comfort 
I get, fortunately an intensive one, is the paren- 
thetical assurance that you spend the hoarded 
strength of your arm in writing music. I have 
never quite got over the shock given me by your 
announcement six months ago that music was 
not for you. There seemed something obscene 
about such a blow to your chance of happiness, 
such a lopping off. I remember once seeing a play- 
mate coming out of his door on crutches after he 
had lost a foot. Bah! my soul sickens yet, after 
fifteen years. These things should not be done 
after these ways. My golden bath, my Semele- 
shower of sensation, has only strengthened my 
conviction that the adventures of the mind are 
beyond all compare more enthralling than the 
adventures of the senses, that no twining of 
amorous limbs can bring the intoxication of the 
airy grappling of the Will to Beauty with the 

91 



SOME LETTERS OF 

feminine latency of thought toward being beauti- 
fully created upon. I hope that is not as snarled 
as it looks on paper, though I know it's full as 
bawdy. 

This conviction is perhaps the best thing I have 
to show for my vacation, however. I observe 
with sudden retrospective dismay that I have 
accomplished next to nothing in printable pages, 
one or two short poems, and a couple of torsoes 
sketched out in the block, but so big that my 
mallet and chisel lose themselves in the inter- 
stices between dust speck and dust speck. I 
clamber with Liliputian ingenuity over the bulk 
thereof, spying out, very agile and bustling, with 
horny eye apprehensive upon cracks and preci- 
pices. As yet no planet-displacing news. 

Remains to be communicated my plan for Sep- 
tember : this : Uncle Horace has had the gentilezza 
to offer me a substantial job of book-editing, 
which if I accomplish in due season will insure me 
another playing-space months earlier than I could 
otherwise hope for it. I propose accordingly to 
cut short off here, sail on the 19th August for 
America, reach Boston by the first of September, 
and spend the ensuing four weeks working in the 
Boston and Cambridge libraries, with seasons of 

92 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

torso-climbing and mint-juleping generously in- 
terspersed 
Till when — 

Will. 

P.S. When you write abroad again use tissue- 
paper and invisible ink and write on both sides. 
My disbursements to the Italian government and 
the Postal Union on your blue-book amounted to 
just eighty-five (85) centesimi. Not that it was n't 
worth ninety (90), but thrift is thrift. 

W. V. M. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

5488 East End Avenue, 
Chicago. 
[January 3, 1898.] 
Dear Dan: 

My gratitude for your stout refusal to forget 
my existence at last forces me to open my lips in 
some galvanic sign of sentience. Having got them 
unlocked I can do little more than let them gape, 
for I have quite lost the use and want of speech — 
at least civilized speech. I have mastered the 
local symbols of communication and can now 
carry on conversation of some length with the 

93 



SOME LETTERS OF 

native population, but it has been at the ex- 
pense of my English. I counted my vocabu- 
lary last night and discovered it to consist of 
ninety -three words. You shall have them all, 
if you will promise not to be reckless with 
them. 

... I am unable at present to express my emo- 
tion over your propaganda of my fame, in a more 
robust way than by enclosing the Good Friday 
Night. Jetsam I have n't a decent copy of, nor 
time to make one. I started in today on another 
quarter's work at the shop — with vacation and 
restored consciousness three months away. From 
now until April I shall not have time to say a 
Credo ; but when the spring is in the air you may 
look for me to drop down on you out of the first 
blue sky. ... Of "spiritual encounters" I have 
had — am having — one; but it is too solemn to 
talk about, short of midnight and the third glass 
— if then. . . . This is a sneaking poor return 
for your good letters, but I am dead tired and 
tomorrow is wash-day. 

Will. 



94 



iWILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Josephine Preston Peabody 

Chicago.' 
Jan. 5, 1898. 

I have just been telling Dan that the alms of 
remembrance which my Cambridge friends (the 
term is inclusive) still bestow at feast-time upon 
me, are taken with no less gratitude because the 
lockjaw which prevents me from nourishing my 
leanness with them also somewhat impedes my 
speech. As for the new year you point a hortatory 
finger at — speriamo I April is only eighty-eight 
lectures, forty committee meetings and several 
thousand themes away, and then I shall be for a 
little time my own man again, with a chance to 
look about and say "Well!" Whether it is to be 
an expletive rather than a considering adverb, 
the gods and several little people have on their 
knees. . . . 

W. V. M. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

5488 East End Ave., 
Chicago, Feb. 21, 1898. 
Dear Rob: 

Your letter and the pictures bring home to me 
my epistolary shortcomings with a painful dis- 

95 



SOME LETTERS OF 

tinctness. I blush with shame when I reflect that 
a scribbled postcard from Viareggio, which you 
probably never got, is the only sign of remem- 
brance and gratitude I have made since our good 
times at Cortina and thereabouts. But to my 
heart my heart was voluble. 

Thanks for the pictures; they fall cool and 
lovely on an eye grown horny with animadversive 
gazing upon Chicago art and nature. I find to my 
considerable depression that Chicago does not 
subdue me to her graces any more masterfully 
than she did two years ago. Indeed, these last 
six months have made me almost as fanatically 
homesick for civilization as my former seven 
quarters succeeded in doing. I lay it, stoutly, 
to a higher organization of the sensorium, but I 
inwardly suspect that it is owing to a depleted 
sand. In either case, release is at hand; I leave in 
less than a month for New York. I should have 
let you know ere this that Spain is out of the 
question for me this year. In the first place I 
have n't the cash, in the second, my Milton is 
not yet completed, and in the third, the climac- 
teric, I want to get a little volume of verse ready 
for press before fall at latest. The Masque, of 
which you make friendly inquiry, is so far as 

96 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

concretions go, much where Cortina left it ; but I 
have thought about it a good deal, and believe I 
can jam it through, with a little leisure. Why do 
you treat the novel with such novercal rigor? By 
all means put it out, before you come back and 
assume all the stifling dignities that await you. 

Remember me to Stickney. I read some of his 
mss. the other day, sent me by Savage. He has 
certainly strengthened much, but does n't seem 
to have quite achieved yet the synthesis of Brown- 
ing with Verlaine, at which he manifestly aims. 

With warmest regards for Ida and the Bambini 
(O egregious plural!) and felicitations upon your 
own patriarchal head, and sorrowings of spirit 
over lost Andalusia, 

As ever. Will. 

The following letter is undated, but as Mrs. Marks 
published her first book, ''The, Wayfarers," in 1898, 
it may from the internal evidence be assigned to the 
early months of that year. 

To Josephine Preston Peahody 

Thanks for the good tidings; they have shed 
about me a reflected glow of spiritual hien-etre rare 
enough in the procession of my days to be relished, 

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I tell you. Then it was n't all reflected either, nor 
will it altogether go with the fading of the ink. 
It is jolly that some of us are going to have a 
say; the elected one must be spokesman for the 
rejected, and say it with an air and a gesture! 
Not without responsibility, in view of the others, 
listening glad but a little jealous, hoping to hear 
it put just their way, and ready to lift protesting 
hands if it is n't. I could swallow my own little 
hiccough of envy with a better grace if I were 
there to dogmatize over title and title-page, order 
and grouping and pruning and padding. I sup- 
pose you will have to struggle along your unillu- 
mined way without me, poor thing; but there will 
come a day of reckoning for all shortcomings, 
when I crawl over your pages, horny eye animad- 
versive upon this and that, antennae excitedly 
waving. And if all is good and seemly without 
and within, I shall go away mollified, and there 
shall be no more drudging that day but only joy, 
in the kingdom of Ants. 

The jewelled white of the New England winter ! 
Here it is mud — sky, lake, boulevard, factory, 
flat, one featureless contiguity of Mud — to say 
nothing of People and their Insides. 

W. V. M. 
98 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Chicago, 
March 13, 1898. 
Dear Dan: 

. . . Thanks for Dunn's poem: I found it 
delightfully rapt and Keatsian: its vagueness is 
not annoying, for it is the vagueness of youth. 
(I wish you could see a picture I have over my 
desk at this moment — an Antonelli da Messina 
— a boy's face full of mystical yearning, set in a 
background of dim trees.) Apropos of verses, the 
Atlantic has taken my Good Friday Night. The 
Bard [Miss Peabody] tells me, with ** valorous" 
tears, that Copeland refuses to put out her book 
before fall, which I suppose is preliminary to the 
crawl direct. Sunt lachrymae rerum. 



About April I, Moody arrived in New York and took 
a room at 109 Waverley Place. He was working hard 
on his edition of Milton, but also found time to write 
out the "Masque of Judgment" in somewhat tentative 
and fragmentary form. This he read to me in Boston, 
early in June. He returned to Chicago for the summer 
and autumn quarters' teaching, spent the Christmas 
holidays in Boston, and in the first days of 1899 estab- 

99 



SOME LETTERS OF 

lished himself in New York again, this time at 318 
West 57th St. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

''The Players." 
New York, April 8, 1898. 
Dear Dan: 

. . . The plan you outline for the Easter vaca- 
tion is so tempting that if you had sprung it on 
me soon enough I suppose I should have yielded 
to your blandishments and given New York the 
go-by. Once here, however, I feel that I ought to 
stay. If I mistake not, my lines are apt to be cast 
in these places permanently in the not distant 
future, and I have a good chance now to make 
some acquaintances and learn the ropes of New 
York life against that desirable time. I have 
already met a number of capital chaps here at the 
Players, where Carpenter has kindly set me down 
— chiefly playwrights, not very big ones I suspect, 
but full of enthusiasm and practical expedient. 
The great thing about them is that they get their 
things played, and that sort of thing, begad, 
begins to appeal to me. Do not believe me quite 
recreant to ideals ; Cambridge and her elegiac air 
seems still lovely and of good report. But these 

100 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

chaps here, though very moderately elegiac and 
of a dubious report, are splendidly American and 
contemporary ; and I feel convinced that this is the 
place for young Americans who want to do some- 
thing. (N.B. I have not enlisted in the marine,) 

... As for yourself, go to Chocorua by all 
means, and believe me with you in wistful imagin- 
ation when the spring sun gilds your mountain 
tops and absorbs the spare goo from my asphalt 
pavements. 

As ever 

W. V. M. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

The Players. 
April 13, 1898. 
Dear Dan: 

. . . Thanks for the addresses : I shall certainly 
look up Harry. If you know any other good 
people here, send me their names and where- 
abouts and a card of introduction. I am going in 
for people now, having made the discovery that 
the average man is among the most unexpected 
and absorbing of beings. . . . 



lOI 



SOME LETTERS OF 



[To Ferdinand SchevilL] 

The Players. 

1 6 Gramercy Park. 
Easter Sunday — '98. 
Dear Ferd: 

I was sorry not to see you to say goodbye, 
though the weeks that intervene between now 
and July ist, when the summoning hour calls me 
to penance, are already shortening so visibly that 
the ceremony of leave-taking seems superfluous. 
New York I find all I fondly imagined, and more. 
The fellows I have met here are immensely cor- 
dial ; they have set me down at two or three inter- 
esting clubs where I am gradually getting an 
insight into this wonderfully virile and variegated 
life. Here at the Players especiall}' there are no 
end of beguiling humans. Most of them are only 
moderately elegiac, to be sure, and their allegiance 
to the sisters of the sacred well is tempered by 
their interest in the genie of the box-office till; 
but they are splendidly American and contempo- 
rary, and some of them are doing good work. I 
dined last night with the man who did Tess over, 
and the air of getting things jammed through 
which pervaded him is pleasantly characteristic 

102 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

of the whole crowd. Whatever the young Ameri- 
can art-producer is, as I see him here in his 
essence, he is certainly not lily-Hvered. The gen- 
eraHzation is inspiriting. 

Milton is stalking along with his usual austerity 
toward completing himself, and besides I get a 
little time for better things. . . . 

W. V. M. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Chicago, Dec. 2, 1898. 
Dear Dan: 

This is an attempt to forestall your righteous 
wrath at my ungentlemanly neglect of your let- 
ters, which have been meat and drink to me at the 
seasons of their arrival and for long after. I will 
accept any punishment except a refusal on your 
part to rejoice over the fact that I am coming 
to Cambridge for Christmas week. Intend thy 
thoughts towards revelry, for there must be mad 
times. Like a sick and lonesome gilligalloo bird 
I begin to think on me native sugar-cane swamps, 
and plume me feathers for a flight thither where 
the carnivoristicous Philistine invadeth not with 
his pot-gun of Important Business, and neither 
moth nor dust doth corrupt. Don't tell me you 

103 



SOME LETTERS OF 

aint going to be to home, for I 'm acalculatin' on 
you for my main holt. 

W. V. M. 

To Mrs. C. H. Toy 

Chicago, Dec. 5, 1898. 
My dear Mrs. Toy: 

This is to say that I expect to spend Christmas 
week in Cambridge. ... I am eager for the queer 
inimitable charm of Cambridge, for that atmos- 
phere of mind at once so impersonal and so warm, 
for that neatness and decency of you children who 
have been washed and dressed and sent to play 
on the front lawn of time by old auntie Ding-an- 
Sich, while we hoodlums contend with the goat 
for tomato cans in the alley. I have a fair line of 
the same to lay before your eyes when I am admit- 
ted inside the aristocratic front gate : some of them 
will make a fine effect in a ring around your 
geranium bed. 

. To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[CmcAGO, Dec. 19, 1898.] 

1. Arrive Friday p.m. or Saturday a.m. Exact 
time to be communicated later. 

2. Will stay at 39 with pleasure. 

104 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

3. Think Chocorua too risky, especially for 
your purposes of recuperation. 

4. You shall loaf, sir. 

5. You shall go to themes once more on Jan. 2 
in a galliard, and conduct consultations in a 
coranto. 

W. V. M. 

To Josephine Preston Peabody 

318 West 57th St. 
New York, Jan. 8, 1899. 
My dear Friend: 

I put off writing Hail and Godspeed when the 
Book came out because I wanted to speak my 
words of pride and praise in person. You were 
not there to hear them, and since then I have 
been caught in the wheels of this world's business. 
But you cannot but believe me when I say that 
the book gave me a very keen delight, first 
because it was yours and second because it was 
the world's, and read in cold type it entirely jus- 
tified my old enthusiasm. Some things, which 
seemed to me less mature and less forthright, I 
could have wished away ; and others I could have 
wished a little nearer the every day speech: but 
even for these the Envoi made amende honorable, 

105 



SOME LETTERS OF 

What we expect of you now is to fulfill the pro- 
mise there made: to take hold of the common 
experience and the common idiom and glorify it. 
Who am I, to be sure, that I should be offering 
sage advice? Yet I hope you ask the question 
without sarcasm, for after all I am one who has 
loved the Muses well, and hoped much from my 
friends, however I may seem to have forgotten 
both the one and the other. 

W. V. M. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Harvard Club. 
27 West 44th St. 
Jan. 17, 1899. 
Dear Dan: 

I certainly sha'n't let you off, now that you have 
been rash enough to make advances. 'F yez don* 
wan' the pants, w'y in hell 'd you try 'em on fur, 
blokey? I answer your questions categorically. 

I. You can see all of me all of the time after 
and including lunch, which I usually take about 
1.30; from the mysteries of my bath, breakfast, 
and matutinal galumphing o'er twin-peaked 
Parnassus, I shall exclude you peremptorily, but 
after 1.30 I am yours till cock-crow. 

106 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

2. My luncheon, consisting of a sandwich and 
a drink, usually costs ten (lo) cents, unless I fre- 
quent a free-lunch counter, when it costs five (5). 
Since looking at the expanse of cheek in the pic- 
ture which you send (and for which I thank you 
kindly) I have about resolved to intermit lunches 
for the time being. If this sounds too Spartan, 
remember that a great deal of Nourishment can 
be bought between Washington Square and Cen- 
tral Park, if you still feel atrophied after lunching 
with me. For dinner I pay (including tip) from 
sixty to eighty-five cents, except on rare occasions 
when I feel proud and sassy — on which occasions 
I sometimes reach the dizzy and disastrous peak of 
a dollar ten. 

3. The weather will be fine. Shut up, I say it 
will! 

I have n't touched the Masque,^ but have 
plunged in medias res with the play.^ It bids fair 
to be short (perhaps 50 minutes to an hour to act) 
but it's developing pretty well. I found myself 
embarrassed a good deal at first by the dull 
monochromatic medium of everyday speech, but 

^ That is, since making the first draft the preceding spring. 
2 The first draft of what eventually became "The Faith 
Healer." 

107 



SOME LETTERS OF 

am getting more used to it now and find that when 
you do get an effect in it it is more flooring than 
anything to be got with bright pigments. I am 
trying hard to give it scenic structure, for as I 
conceive it nearly half of it will be dumb show; 
at least a great deal of its effectiveness will depend 
on the acting. I shall have it ready to read to you 
— at least in first draft — when you appear. I 've 
got a Chinese restaurant to show you on Mott 
Street; likewise a Chinese stew that will make 
your gizzard turn pale with joy. Refusing to be 
refused, 

W. V. M. 



To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[New York, Jan. 31, 1899.] 
[Postal card.] 
Are you going to take those pants? It is 
important for me to know, as there are other 
customers. If a hasty decision (or the necessity 
of it) will prejudice the possibility of your coming, 
however, put it off until the ninth hour. You*d 
better come. Verbum sapienti. Pictures — - music 
— theatre — dives — dinners — Broadway — 
Bowery — beer — girls — galoots — grippe — [the 

108 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

last word is stricken out] Heaven forefend ! I Ve 
just come out of it. 

W. V. M. 

To Ferdinand Schevill 

The Players. 
1 6 Gramercy Park. 
New York, Feb. 20, 1899. 
Dear Ferd: 

The great king Grippe reigns in Babylon, and 
his hand has been heavy on all his subjects — 
especially yours afflictedly. . . . 

Are you still minded to woo the Muse under 
these skies in spring? There may be better places, 
but there surely are worse; and if the Muse 
though never so strictly meditated prove thank- 
less, there yet remain Amaryllis and the tangles 
of Neaera's hair. The latter is usually a wig, but 
very nicely tangled and adequate for most pur- 
poses of distraction. 

• •••••• 

Will. 
Address, 318 West 57th St. 



109 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Atlantic Transport Line, S. S. Mesaba. 
New York, March ii. [1899.] 
Dear Dan: 

This is only a word to say that I have been 
unable to resist the very low rates of passage 
brought about by the rate- war between the trans- 
atlantic lines, and am off for England. ... I 
shall settle down and work steadily. . . . 

Hastily, 

W. V. M. 



To Ferdinand Schevill 

36 Guilford St., W. C. 
London, April 21. [1899.] 
Dear Ferd: 

I have been away from London, hunting for 
the wisdom of the thrush, so that your letter 
reaches me late. I hasten to assure you that you 
need n't be afraid of missing April's careless rap- 
ture; it's warranted not to be subject to draft 
this year before May. We have had next to no 
spring as yet, and if you girded up your pajamas 
and came across next month you would get both 

no 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

overture and tuning-up. Seriously, why can't 
you? Fares are so low that it's cheaper to come 
than stay, and we could have some rememberable 
hours: the country promises to be ravishing in a 
week or two more, and is already good. Walking 
from Wraysbury to Horton yesterday (a distance 
of 2^ miles across the fields) I counted eleven sky- 
larks, all soaring and singing fit to break your 
heart. . . . 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

London, May 13, 1899. 
Dear Dan: 

. . . The Masque is done, all but the finishing 
touches and one song which wont get itself written 
straight. I have one or two small projects on 
hand to the pursuit of which I intend to devote 
this next month. . . . 

W. V. M. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

31 Graduate Hall, 
Chicago, July 5, '99. 
Dear Dan: 

If I had written to you as often as I have 
thought of you, especially since I heard of poor 

III 



SOME LETTERS OF 

Savage*s death, ^ you would have had no cause to 
complain. The news came to me on the boat, and 
came with a strange solemnity there in the middle 
of the ocean. I do not know of anybody who could 
go beyond time — that ''thing how slight!" ^ — 
with better hopes of contentment there. It must 
have been almost at the very hour of his death 
that Joe Stickney ^ and I sat talking of him in the 
twilight of a Paris spring afternoon, and reading 
some of his lines with certain hopes of the larger 
though surely no sweeter or purer work he was to 
do some day. I do not know why the death of a 
spiritual man, at least one who dies in youth, is so 
much more moving than that of another. One 
would expect it to be the contrary way : perhaps 
it is to the true understanding. Well, he has left 

1 Philip Henry Savage (1868-1899), a contemporary of 
Moody's at Harvard, who wrote poetry of remarkable delicacy 
and distinction. 

2 "Brother, Time is a thing how slight! 
Day lifts and falls, and it is night. 
Rome stands an hour, and the green leaf 
Buds into being bright and brief. 
For us, God has at least in store 
One shining moment, less or more. 
Seize, then, what mellow sun we may, 
To light us in the darker day." 
" Poems" of Philip Henry Savage. Small, Maynard & Co., 1901. 
' Joseph Trumbull Stickney (i 874-1 904), another Harvard 
poet, whose poems Moody and others edited after his early death. 

112 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

behind a half-dozen lyrics that will last as long as 
the nation, or longer. Let us be content with that, 
as he doubtless was. 

I have no time now, in the rush of the opening 
quarter, to tell you about myself, except to say 
that I heeded your admonition and ''dropped a 
book" as I came through New York.^ Macmillan 
is reading it. I have n't much confidence that the 
poor little volume will ever see the light under 
such august patronage, but somebody or other 
will be found with an eye to the thanks of pos- 
terity and a proud contempt for the contemporary 
dollar, I hope. I shall know its present fate in a 
few weeks and will let you know promptly. 

As for the Milton, it has I believe been out 
several weeks or months, though I have not yet 
seen a copy. If you want to learn what the New 
York Nation thinks of it, look in the columns of 
that sheet for the latter part of April. It does not 
leave enough of me to bury. I am told that other 
critics (Literature, the Dial, etc.) have been more 
plenteous in mercy, but I have n't had strength 
to look, after the Nation man-handling. 



1 This must have been the "Poems," eventually published in 
190 1 by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 

113 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Mrs. C. H. Toy 

Chicago, Sept. 25, 1899. 
My dear Mrs. Toy: 

If I were not socially irreclaimable I should have 
told you long before this how when I got back to 
London that home of depression and tedium did 
its accustomed work upon me, and how in despair 
I fled to the country, from whose absolute green- 
ness and comparative sunshine not even you and 
Miss Goodwin could tempt me. It strikes me 
upon re-reading that sentence that I never 
achieved such a climax in the course of my expres- 
sive life before, the emphasis falling the more 
thunderously because of the contrast in the un- 
amiable life about me to those gay and friendly 
Paris days. Especially that morning we spent in 
rambling talk in the Luxembourg gardens often 
comes back to me with a quite peculiar charm, for 
which the decor is not wholly responsible, but 
rather "the human heart by which we live." 

I am looking forward with eagerness to Boston 
and Cambridge this winter. The longer I live the 
more grateful I feel for the good and tried friends 
that I made there, and that have so generously 
borne and foreborne. Earnestly yours, 

William Vaughn Moody. 

114 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

P.S. Do you know Landor's Imaginary Con- 
versation in which a General Mavrocordato 
figures? An ancestor of your man? 

To Josephine Preston Peahody 

The Quadrangle Club. 
Chicago, September 30, '99. 
Your generous praise makes me rather shame- 
faced: you ought to keep it for something that 
counts. At least other people ought: you would 
find a bright ringing word, and the proportion of 
things would be kept. As for me I am doing my 
best to keep the proportion of things, in the midst 
of no-standards and a dreary dingy fog-expanse 
of darkened counsel. Bah ! here I am whining in 
my third sentence, and the purpose of this note 
was not to whine, but to thank you for heart 
new-taken. I take the friendly words, (for I need 
them cruelly) and forget the inadequate occasion 
of them. I am looking forward with almost fever- 
ish pleasure to the new year, when I shall be among 
friendships which time, and absence, and half- 
estrangement have only made to shine with a 
more inward light; and when, so accompanied, I 
can make shift to think and live a little. Do not 
wait till then to say Welcome. W. V. M. 

115 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

The Quadrangle Club. 
Chicago, Nov. 27, 1899. 
Dear Dan: 

... I have been and still am driven with work, 
so that when I get a half-hour's leisure I am too 
done up to put one idea to another. But a good 
time is coming, and right soon, thank God! I 
shall be in Boston by the end of the Christmas 
holidays — and then ho ! for talk and talk and 
talk, wherein all arrears shall be cancelled. I am 
on the verge of a good fortune that I hardly dare 
write about, for fear the envious gods will snatch 
it away. If they do not, I shall be yours not only 
for this spring but also for the summer and a good 
slice of next year. Will let you know at once when 
the die is cast.^ . . . 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

The Quadrangle Club. 
Chicago, Dec. 2nd, 1899. 
Dear Dan: 

Your magnificence in paying down instantly 

* He was enabled to take a considerable holiday from the uni- 
versity by his receipts from the "History of English Literature" 

116 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

and royally for my mangy little note compels me 
to snatch another moment to make a part of it 
clearer. The hint which I threw out as to the 
possibility of getting a long "vacation" (you'll 
see in a minute that it is n't to be altogether 
vacant) means, to wit, that I am about to con- 
clude negotiations with one of two rival firms who 
are equally convinced of my transcendant abili- 
ties, for a history of English literature for High 
Schools. In one case I am to do the whole of it 
and in the other half, and I incline to the latter 
because of the natural jealousy I feel of my time 
just now. The half of the job I can do, I think, 
in the spare or slack time of a year, and have my 
mornings pretty free for better things. It will 
bring me in five hundred plunks on delivery and 
if successful ought to constitute a source of per- 
manent though small income. If these negotia- 
tions turn out all right, and I get the percentage 
of royalty for which I am stickling, I am going to 
apply for as long a leave of absence as the authori- 
ties will allow me, perhaps a year and a half, as I 
think I can pull through that period on what I 
have saved or can easily earn. The summer I am 

on which he presently began work, in collaboration with Mr. 
Lovett. 

117 



SOME LETTERS OF 

bound to have though the Heavens fall, or rather 
because they are not going to fall but remain as a 
fittingly modest framework to the spectacle of my 
felicity. 

Your conjecture about my work last spring 
(with the implied reproof and warning) is partly 
well-founded. Not wholly; for though London 
oppressed me brutally I worked the Masque out 
to twice its previous proportions, and most of the 
new matter seems to bear the test of cold subse- 
quent criticism. It is now four times as long as 
when you saw it in fragment. There are, counting 
re-writing and further development here and 
there, about five hundred lines to be added, which 
will leave it about the length of a substantial five- 
act play — large enough to make a tidy volume by 
itself, if I can implore or coerce any publisher into 
printing it. With the Schlatter play ^ I have done 
little more. It wont do as it is, and I don't see yet 
how to go about resmelting it, though I still be- 
lieve there is something in it worth saving. This 
will be one of the tasks of the winter. My heart 
leaps up when I behold, A calendar on the sly. I 
don't trust myself to envisage the same with pre- 
pense, for fear of danger to furniture and window 

1 "The Faith Healer." 
Ii8 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

glass. Have just heard from Robinson,^ who con- 
veys some lyric gibberish of yours about apples 
— if that 's the word, I can't make out his im- 
moral fist with certainty. . . . 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[Postmarked: Chicago, Dec. i8, 1899.] 
Put it behind thee, my boy ; 't is a device of 
Satan — a whisper of the Demon of Unrest and 
Seller of Dead Sea Apples. For which belief I shall 
soon furnish {viva voce) argument. The Muses, 
I groundedly believe, reside at present on an 
obscure peak (not yet visited) of New Hampshire 
or Maine; that is, if they have not already suc- 
cumbed to the attractions of Pike's Peak or 
Mount Shasta. At any rate that's where I pur- 
pose to seek them, and Europe be damned. I have 
spoken. W. V. M. 

Moody arrived in Boston at Christmas, and took a 
room in the Hermitage, No. i Willow St. It was here 
that, as I find recorded in my journal at the time, he 
finally completed **The Masque of Judgment," Jan- 
uary 25, 1900. The "Ode in Time of Hesitation" was 
also written during this period, and appeared in the 

1 Edwin Arlington Robinson, author of "Captain Craig," 
"The Town Down the River," etc. 

119 



SOME LETTERS OF 

Atlantic Monthly for May. In the early spring he 
established himself at East Gloucester, Massachu- 
setts, where he wrote "Gloucester Moors" and the 
"Menagerie," and revised the play dealing with 
Schlatter, the "New Mexico Messiah," which he read 
to a group of his friends at Falmouth, Mass., in July. 
During part of the summer he lived with his friend Mr. 
Truman H. Bartlett, in Chocorua, N. H. In October 
he was again settled in Willow St., but in November 
he went to New York, where he lived at 71 Irving 
Place until his return to Chicago in January, 1901, 
save for part of the Christmas holidays, spent with one 
of his sisters in Newton, Massachusetts. 

During all this period, a most important one in his 
poetic development, he had to give a considerable por- 
tion of his time to the text-book on English literature, 
but managed to keep his mornings largely free for 
creative work. The period is notable for publication 
as well as for production: "The Masque of Judgment'* 
was printed by Small, Maynard & Co. in November, 
1900, and the " Poems" appeared in May, 1901, under 
the imprint of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

I Willow St. 
Boston, March 22, 1900. 
Dear Rob: 

I have just finished the early (Pre- Chaucerian) 
portion of the greatest critical commentary of 

120 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

modern times, and in view of my struggles there- 
with your jaunty proposition to have your half 
of the job done by midsummer, and teaching to 
boot, fills me with envy. To be sure I had for- 
gotten all my Anglo-Saxon and never knew any 
Middle English, and had to grub like hell to get 
at the stuff in some respectably first-hand way; 
but that this chapter should have taken me six 
solid weeks of my precious vacation breaks my 
heart. 

. ..\.. • • • • • • 

As ever, 
Will. 
To Daniel Gregory Mason 

The Harbor View, East Gloucester, 
April 6, [1900.] 
Dear Dan: 

I have put off writing you in order to give this 
place a thorough test and report definitely upon it 
as a vacation resort. I have liked it from the first 
and like it better the longer I stay. The humors of 
the harbor are many and its picturesqueness inex- 
haustible. The moors, which stretch for several 
miles to the eastward, are beautiful in color and 
form, and the coast, although not rugged, is very 
diversified. The house itself is as good a coun- 

121 



SOME LETTERS OF 

try inn as I ever saw. . . . There are a good 
many girls here now and are Hkely to be until 
after the Easter vacation; but they will let you 
alone if you insist. . . . 

Let me know at once if you will venture it for 
the holidays, as I may have to bespeak your room 
in advance. I have hunted out some glorious 
walks and believe that — if you can bring books 
enough to beguile your mornings and evenings — 
we can have a first-rate time. 

W. V. M. 

P.S. There is a ghastly piano: fortunately it 
is so ghastly that few of our virtuosi brave its 
terrors. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

The Harbor View 
[East Gloucester, April ii, 1900.] 
Dear Dan: 

The room is all right, whether you come Satur- 
day or Monday. Perhaps if you want to like the 
place you had better wait till Monday to avoid 
getting your first impression under the Sunday 
blight; but you best know your own fortitude. 
Bring outing duds, of course: possibly a boiled 
shirt for evenings, if you 're haughty. ... If you 

122 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

come In the afternoon, and will let me know when, 
I will meet you at the station. If I am not there 
take trolley car which passes station, labelled 
Rocky (not Rubber) Neck, and tell the conductor 
to put you off at the Harbor View. It is a two- 
mile ride, over a very tempestuous road-bed. 
Bring heavy shoes, if possible waterproof, as the 
moors are apt to be dampish in the low places and 
we don't want to have to keep to the roads. A 
cap is an absolute necessity for comfort in shore 
tramps. 

W. V. M. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

Harbor View Inn. 
Gloucester, Mass., April 30. 
Dear Rob: 

Tomorrow would seem to be the first of May, 
and I am sending, according to agreement, the 
three chapters of the text-book which I have 
blocked out. They are in first draft and I fear 
not very legible in all places, but there is no type- 
writer in this village and I had n't the heart to 
copy those hundred and ten weary pages. You 
can easily decipher enough to afford grounds for 
a curse-out. 

123 



'SOME LETTERS OF 

I should especially like to have criticism as 
to proportion ; I find this the most difficult mat- 
ter to gauge and adjust. In general, I realize 
that the Anglo-Saxon chapter and the chapter 
on the drama before Shakespeare are both too 
long. I think I can cut them down some in re- 
writing. 

I am convinced by the part I have done that 
we must make a great effort to keep the thing 
simple and broad. To do this without falling 
into the stick-candy style is hard; I realize 
that in many places I have been narrow and 
mixed, in my struggles to convey some little 
nutriment of fact in the kissing-comfits of gen- 
eralization. 

As you will see by the postmark I have fled 
Beacon Hill and set up my everlasting rest by the 
sea. This little fishing village is a bewitching 
place, and the country about, to the extremest 
tip of Cape Ann, is as good as Brittany. . . . 

As ever yours, 

W. V. M. 



124 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 



To Mary L. Mason 

Harbor View Inn. 
Gloucester, Mass., 

May 1st, 1900. 
My dear Mrs. Mason: 



Gloucester continues to be almost too good to 
be true. Dan and I had a capital ten days to- 
gether, but the orchestra was only tuning up then ; 
now the first theme is being given out, high, high 
in the violins. Pace Ap thorp. ^ 

Mr. C is a good man and true: he scorns 

the doctrine that discretion is the better part of 
friendship. Of such are the kingdom of heaven. 
Earnestly yours, 

W. V. Moody. 

To Mary L, Mason 

The Harbor View. 
East Gloucester, Mass. 
May 16, 1900. 
Dear Mrs. Mason: 

Your invitation is very tempting, though as far 
as the Gloucester spring is concerned I 'm willing 

^ W. F. Apthorp, who was at that time compiling the analyt- 
ical program books of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 

125 



SOME LETTERS OF 

to back it for handsomeness even against the 
Milton variety. Promptly at 9 o'clock each morn- 
ing I put on blinders, stuff my ears with wax, and 
strap myself to the desk, in order to do my day's 
stint on a text-book on English Literature (God 
save the mark!) which I have to get a certain 
portion of done this month. . . . 

Faithfully yours, 
William Vaughn Moody. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 
[Undated. Probably May or June, 1900.] 
Dear Dan: 

I will answer as categorically as you inquire : 

1st. I beseech you to come. 

2nd. I will join you at luncheon on the beach,* 
and offer my services as guide, philosopher, and 
friend. 

3rd. I will not read the Ode, the Faith-Healer, 
nor any other damned thing under the shining 
canopy. I will talk with you, walk with you, play 
with you, and stay with you, and so following ; but 
I will not read for you nor bleed for you. What 
news on the Rial to? 

W. V. M. 

* A small picnic party was proposed. 
126 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Prout's Neck. [Maine.] 
June 23, iQCX). 
Dear Dan: 

, . . The only hotel open in the place is this 
one, the Checkley, which I tackled in despair after 
knocking in vain at the doors of several less im- 
posing hostelries. I was agreeably surprised to 
find I could get a small but fairly comfortable 
room here for ten plunks per. . . . The high 
piazzas command a great view of the bay and 
open sea. ... Of the eighteen people now here, 
I am the only one who could be called a star, but 
there are prospects of a more or less stellar sort 
for the immediate future. The place is so roomy 
that I don't believe the non-stellar people will get 
on our nerves. ... If you decide to come, as I 
hope, the following is the manner. 

Boat leaves India Wharf at 7 p.m. Be on hand 
by 6.15 in order to get stateroom. Fare (including 
stateroom) to Portland, $2.00. Go to bed early, 
for she gets into Portland Harbor long before 
dawn and there is thenceforward a hell of a noise 
unloading things. You can stay in bed until 7, 
and breakfast on the boat. Take street car 

127 



SOME LETTERS OF 

passing wharf, marked Union Station, which will 
deposit you in front of the ticket window. Ask 
politely the man behind the window to give you a 
ticket to Scarboro Beach, price sixteen cents. At 
Scarboro Beach {not Scarboro Crossing) you will 
find a stage running to this hotel, a four mile ride 
for which you pay 50 cents. With these few hints 
to guide you, and the exercise of your native 
sagacity and presence of mind in peril, you will 
arrive. 

Be of good courage, and come. Don*t forget 
your bathing suit. 

Yours, 

W. V. M. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Chocorua, N. H. 
July 29th, 1900. 
Dear Dan: 

Immediately on my arrival I was swooped down 
upon by Mr. Bartlett, and soon transferred bag 
and baggage to his house, where I am living in 
undisturbed possession of the upper story. We 
get our own breakfast and take dinner and supper 
at the hotel. He wants me to say that when you 
come next week he hopes you will join us. I think 

128 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

we could have a very jolly time together. The 
old boy is in marvellous form, and stars the pass- 
ing hours with immortal phrases. 

As ever, 

Will. 

To Robert Morss Lovett 

Chocorua, N. H. 
Aug. 1 8th, 1900. 
Dear Rob: 

I am, as you see, at Chocorua, and expect to be 
here about two weeks longer. ... I am working 
now on the Milton period; have it something 
more than half done. 

I am staying with a Mr. Bartlett, ex-sculptor, 
art critic, and in spite of all a magnificent old goat 
and man of God. 

Yours, 

W. V. M. 

To Edmund Clarence Stedman 

I Willow Street, 

Boston, Oct. 30, 1900. 
My dear Mr. Stedman: 

I give myself the pleasure of sending, in advance 
129 



SOME LETTERS OF 

of publication, The Masque of Judgment, about 
which I wrote you a word or two last spring. 
Doubtless you are overwhelmed with tributes of 
this questionable kind, yet I am bold enough to 
hope you will read the book, even if it remains in 
your mind as a symbol of grotesquely ambitious 
"first volumes." 

Another copy, properly bound, will be sent on 
publication, the second week of November. 
Believe me 

Very earnestly yours, 
William Vaughn Moody. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Salmagundi Club. 
14 West 12th St., N. Y. 
Nov. 14, 1900. 
Dear Dan: 

... I am pretty lonely here, as Robinson has 
gone to Hoboken or Spuytenduyvil or somewhere, 
to live with the goats, and I only see him once a 
week. For a few days I thought the noise would 
drive me wild, and I was more than once on the 
point of fleeing back to the Hermitage, which by 
comparison seems to the fond eye of memory 
to deserve its name. There are three hundred 

130 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

and twenty-three hand-organs and ninety-seven 
pianos on our block, and every hour thirty-five 
thousand drays loaded with sheet iron pass the 
house. Irving Place, you know, is a quiet old- 
fashioned neighborhood, so we are justly proud 
of these slight evidences of animation. 

The theatres (which are after all what I came 
for) are good, and a great resource. . . . 

Will. 

My address is 71 Irving Place. 

To Mary L, Mason 

The Players. 
16 Gramercy Park. 
New York, Nov. 30, 1900. 
My dear Mrs. Mason: 

I am sorry that you found the upshot of the 
Masque (I mean its main drift and meaning) 
negative or destructive. I did not intend it to be 
so. For me the kernel of the thing was Raphael's 
humanistic attitude and Uriel's philosophy, 
especially his ''confession of faith" in Act iii. 
Scene 11. The rest of it was only mythological 
machinery for exhibiting the opposed attitude 
and philosophy — that of the deniers of life. I 
hoped that the positive meaning might disengage 

131 



SOME LETTERS OF 

itself as a kind of aroma or emotion from the 
whole, and that the poem would thus subserve 
just such a brave love of life and faith in its 
issues as you plead for. If this does not happen 
for the sympathetic reader, then I have failed 
wholly. 

Your praise of the manner of the poem I am 
grateful for, especially as it came at a moment of 
deep discouragement. Believe me, 

Always faithfully yours, 

William Vaughn Moody. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

The Players. 
1 6 Gramercy Park. 
New York, Nov, 30, 1900. 
Dear Dan: 

Your generous praise of the Masque gave me 
great joy, for I was going through a crisis of dis- 
couragement which made my months of labor and 
engrossment upon it seem pitiably futile. I am 
alarmed about myself, when I notice that the 
fluctuations of heaven-scaling confidence and 
something very like despair, instead of decreasing 
as they ought to do, seem to increase with my 
years and knowledge. I don't understand it at 

132 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

all, nor do I see any way of combating it that 
promises much. 

Your sister [in-law] has just written, and from 
her tone I gather that she found the total impres- 
sion of the book rather gloomy and pessimistic. 
I 'm afraid I have n't made clear enough the posi- 
tive part — the love of life and belief in its issues 
— which I meant to be the core of the matter. 
How do you feel about it? 

Always yours. 

Will. 
To Mrs. C. H. Toy 

Century Club, New York. 
December 12, 1900. 
Dear Mrs. Toy: 

Your objection to the "theology** of the 
Masque would be well taken if there were any 
theology in it. There is n*t an ounce, or at least 
if there is it is there against my will. Of course I 
didn't intend my "strangely unpleasant" God 
to be taken seriously. To me the whole meaning 
and value of the poem lies in the humanistic atti- 
tude and character of Raphael, the philosophic 
outlook of Uriel, and the plea for passion as a 
means of salvation everywhere latent. The rest 

133 



SOME LETTERS OF 

of it IS only mythological machinery for symboliz- 
ing the opposed doctrine — that of the denial of 
life. As Christianity (contrary of course to the 
wish and meaning of its founder) has historically 
linked itself with this doctrine, I included certain 
aspects of it in this mythological apparatus — 
always with a semi-satirical intention. I meant to 
write a poem, pure and simple; and my western 
friends, with the naive t6 proper to them, seem to 
have accepted it as such; but Cambridge insists 
on treating it as a theological treatise. As such, 
they can but find it pretty foolish, I fear. . . . 

From the time of Moody's return to Chicago at the 
beginning of 1901 his letters, much less frequent and 
voluminous than formerly, leave many gaps in the 
record of his life. He was now able to get longer leaves 
of absence from his teaching, and spent much time in 
travelling, both in America and in Europe. His love 
of wild life led him to the Rocky Mountains with 
Mr. Hamlin Garland in the summer of 1901, and to 
Arizona, alone, in the spring of 1904 — excursions 
which later bore fruit in his first published prose play, 
"The Great Divide." He made a trip to Greece in 
1902. The rest of this period he divided between 
Boston, New York, and Chicago. The chief literary 
event was the publication of his second poetic drama> 
*'The Fire-Bringer," in March, 1904. 

134 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Chicago, Jan. i6, 1901. 
Dear Dan: 

Many thanks for the post-card containing 
extract from Robinson's letter. Such words from 
him cannot but give me immense satisfaction, 
both because he is a man who weighs his words 
and because they apply in this case to a kind of 
writing with which he has n't much patience in 
general (I mean the "history of the world" kind 
of thing) so that I don't feel compelled in honesty 
to discount for personal bias. Well, he can afford 
to be generous. 

It has been the very devil to get down to work 
again, after my long and keenly relished holiday. 
Chicago seemed uglier and grimmer than I had 
believed possible. There was nothing to do but 
shut my eyes, put my sensibilities in the lower 
bureau drawer, and sail in. Gradually the benefi- 
cent numbness of drudgery is stealing over me, 
and that unilluminated dogged patience which 
constitutes my substitute for moral courage is 
beginning to possess what in other seasons I am 
wont to refer to exuberantly as my soul. It is at 
such times as this that I envy you most keenly 

135 



SOME LETTERS OF 

your unflinching hold upon spiritual truth, and 
your power of walking in the light of it. The best 
I can do is to hump my back, turn down my hat 
brim, and stoically count the number of streams 
running down my back, until the damned drizzle 
decides to cease. . . . 

Write when you feel like it, and don't till you 
do. I mean do when you do rather than don't. 
That is to say do do and don't don't. See? 

Will. 

To Edwin Arlington Robinson 

The Quadrangle Club. 
Chicago, Jan. 24, 1901. 
Dear Robinson: 

You will not have thought it was indifference 
to your *'poor words of congratulation" about 
the Masque which has kept me from answering 
sooner. What you said gave me the deepest — 
joy, I was going to say; but remembering your 
distrust of exuberant language, I will say satis- 
faction. Still, it was joy, all the same — the feel- 
ing was exuberant enough to warrant, this once, 
my florid vocabulary. Your words were the more 
grateful because they came as a surprise. I 
thought in New York that you were bravely try- 

X36 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

ing to be generous (you would have said "just") 
toward a thing you rootedly deplored but sus- 
pected yourself of being by nature prejudiced 
against. As you had more than done your duty 
on this hypothesis, I could not but consider this 
later testimony as being the voice of the natural 
man, speaking the faith that was in him ; and there- 
fore I rejoiced. 

Chicago is several kinds of hell, but I won't 
weary you with asseverations that I am being 
shamefully victimized by fate; you won't believe 
it, and besides it 's a lie. I am merely paying the 
market rates for my bread and beer, commodities 
for which many a better man has been villain- 
ously overcharged. Some of the vacation memo- 
ries I most like to hark back to and mouse dream- 
ily over are those walks we had from Riverdale 
to Yonkers, especially the last one. This is n't a 
letter, but it would be a pleasant fiction and a 
graceful act for you to consider it so, and write me 
one. 

Always yours, 

W. V. M. 



137 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Mrs, C. H. Toy 

Chicago, 
March 2, 1901. 
Dear Mrs. Toy: 

. . . Life here is as ever. More different kinds 
of a mistake and an affliction than you can dream 
— you there in that gentle elegiac Cambridge. 
Not that I would give up my journey through the 
realms of woe ; I am learning a lot down here, and 
each descending circle of the lamentable pit makes 
me surer that I did well to come. But ah, I long 
for a Virgil to comment and illuminate the thing 
now and then ! Even Dante had to be personally 
conducted through hell, and I guess he was right 
smart more of a hero than what I be. It 's melting 
outside today, and the sun is doing a South 
Halstead street bunco game on a confiding world. 
Here is a poem inspired by my last attempt to 
wade the street: 

Gutters sing. 
Is it spring? 
Does old Winter 
Now beginter 
Quit? 
Nit! 
138 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

Long time yet, 
You bet, 

Ere G. S.^ 
Comes to bless 

Us. I guess 
Yes. 

These ''Thoughts on a Thaw" I think of sub- 
mitting as my contribution to the next edition of 
The Poets of Indiana: an Anthology; just pubHshed 
by Macmillan. At present I 'm not represented, 
but I '11 force them to recognize me yet. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Wagon Wheel Gap. 
Colorado, Aug. 30, 1901. 
Dear Dan: 

If to do were as easy as to know what 't were 
good to do, I should not have thus neglected the 
best of friends and good fellows. Your two letters 
and the picture reached me — I am ashamed to 
think how many months ago, and I was too low in 
my mind even to send a word of goodbye on your 
departure for Paris. I waved a loving, if dispirited, 
farewell from the central core of Chicago's smoke 

* Gentle Spring. 



SOME LETTERS OF 

cloud, and in that infernal seat of contemplation 
have often mused upon your goings and comings 
in the Latin Quarter. Tai pauvre. Nous partons 
aujourd'hui. By pronouncing these mysterious 
formulae I have many times evoked you in con- 
frontation with that so elusive world of will and 
idea which we once endeavored to comprehend 
together and found and shall find entirely incom- 
prehensible. . . . 

At present, as the superscription of this scrawl 
will show you, I am in the wilds of the Rockies, 
where I have been camping and trailing with 
Hamlin Garland, in some of the savagest old 
country these States afford. Garland had the bad 
luck to get his foot crushed (his horse fell on it in 
scrambling out of a bog up a steep bank) and he is 
laid up for a week or two. Meantime I am doing 
some of the mountain passes on horseback, riding 
from thirty to fifty miles a day, trying to get the 
stale taste of a year's academica out of my mouth. 

I am free now for a year. I shall stay west 
(somewhere near Chicago) until I get that 
wretched text-book done (this time it has got to 
be done!). . . . This scrawl is all I am up to just 
now, after a hard day's ride and last night spent 
sleeplessly in a deserted mountain hut with three 

140 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

or four other benighted travellers. Travellers is 
euphemistic: with the doubtful exception of 
myself they were tramps — miners out of a job 
hoboing it to a new mining camp. And down- 
right good fellows they were, too, barring the 
absence of certain niceties of person — which, 
indeed, our somewhat casual quarters were not 
calculated to encourage. If by good luck this 
finds you at Chocorua, greet for me the Grand 
Old Man and his pals the mountains. Cull for me 
a morning phrase, big as Whiteface and dewy as 
those morning glories on the projected and now I 
trust realized pergola. I grow disproportioned. 
But cull it for me natheless (as the Bard would 
say) and send it to me along with an account of 
yourself in all the moods and tenses. 

Always yours, 

W. V. M. 

To Mary L. Mason 

I Willow St. 
[Boston.] Dec. 27 [1901]. 
My dear Mrs. Mason: 

It was immensely kind of you to remember me 
on Christmas day. I have been munching the 
ginger as I work, and eagerly watching for some 

141 



SOME LETTERS OF 

effect on my style. Did you send it in that hope? 
If so, I trust that means you are sufficiently inter- 
ested in the fate of the text-book to be willing to 
do some more typewriting for it. . . . Will you 
let me know whether to send you more MS., and 
also will you send me a memorandum of what we 
owe you for the two chapters on the novel? 

Yours, 

W. V. M. 

To Josephine Preston Peahody 

I Willow St. 
Jan. 5, 1902. 
Dear J. P. P., 

I am not going to apologize for not telling you 
so sooner, but am going to tell you at once and 
to your face that I think the Play ["Marlowe"] 
is a beauty. For honest beauty and wisdom and 
strength it beats Stephen Phillips and the rest of 
them out of the world. Your blank verse has 
strengthened incalculably since Fortune and M. E. 
It has just the clearness, grip, and nervousness I 
have been looking for it to attain. The ventrilo- 
quism of your dialogue impresses me more at each 
reading — a great and hard thing to achieve in 

142 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

blank verse. I can count on one hand the drama- 
tists who have learned that trick of mirroring 
character — mental status — etc., in the move- 
ment of a blank verse line. Your Marlowe is a 
woman's Marlowe, but all the better for that. 
He is what he ought to have been and perhaps 
essentially was, underneath, though I doubt if he 
found it out — probably went to the dogs for not 
finding it out. Your Alison is a man's Alison, and 
all the better for that! (Only a man would never 
call her ''the Little Quietude," and I wish you 
had n't. I know I'm a brute for not liking that 
and the ''shrine" business, but I don't.) But all 
the figures are greatly energized — snap fire when 
you touch them — and Marlowe is full of those 
brave translunary things that the first poets had. 
By all the Muses, we shall have an American 
drama yet, and it will date from Marlowe: a 

Play. 

I have been living in a night-mare since I got 
here, and have seen no one. The strain is nearly 
over, and I am beginning to remember once more 
that this world is after all a real world, full of such 
good things as friends and friendly talk. I am 
coming out to see you in a day or two, and you 
must n't shut the door on me because my manners 

143 



SOME LETTERS OF 

are bad. My heart is a good heart, and wears 
Kentish russet — 

W. V. M. 

To Mary L. Mason 

I Willow St. 
Boston, Jan. 27, 1902. 
My dear Mrs. Mason: 

Your word of praise for the poor text-book was 
most cheering; I shall hope and trust, after this, 
that it is n't as bad as it seems to me. It lies on 
my spirit like Incubus. 

. . . Your feminine mathematics juggled you 
out of about fifteen hundred words on your last 
count. Thank God that you are dealing with a 
just man, and forswear addition: it is a vain 
thing for safety. 

Always yours, 

W. V. M. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Mackinac Island, Mich. 
Oct. 22, 1903. 
Dear Dan: 

Rumor vaguely reports you as domiciled at the 
Benedick, and my hopes that you are so are too 
strong to allow me to doubt. I have spent the 

144 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

summer on this little island in Lake Huron, fin- 
ishing the poem of which I read you the beginning 
(you may remember) last winter.^ I have often 
thought of you and wondered where you were. 
Now that winter and return to city life is at hand, 
and the possibility of my spending said winter in 
New York is good, my eagerness to hear from you, 
and if the good fates will permit me, to get quar- 
ters within hearing distance of your voice and 
your piano, reaches the point of epistolary explo- 
sion — as you know, a high point with me, . . . 

To Josephine Preston Peahody 

Chicago, March 22 [1904]. 
Dear J. P. P.: 

I was sorry not to see you again, especially if 
you were primed with talk about It; for I, as 
always, am wearying to know about It, but seem 
daily farther from achieving knowledge. The 
more I have to do with It, the more It escapes 
my thought and definition. I don't mean to imply 
that you were going to think or define, but I 
suspect that you were going to throw out memo- 
rable speech, while revolving invisible with illu- 
mination upon your stellar axis. 

* Probably "The Fire-Bringer." 



SOME LETTERS OF 

I am hesitating whether or not to go to the 
Great Desert of Arizona and live with the Indians 
and "lung-ers" this spring. Probably I shall go. 
If I never come back, but stay and choose some 
savage woman to rear my dusky race, remember 
that I intended a copy of the Fire-Eater [sic] for 
you, with a handsome inscription. Yours, 

W. V. M. 

To Edwin Arlington Robinson 

Hotel Baltimore. 
Kansas City, Mo., March 29, 1904. 

Dear Robinson: 

Behold me en route for Arizona, the Painted 
Desert, and aboriginal life. . . . 

The Fire-Eater [The Fire-Bringer] reached me 
just a minute before I left Chicago, and I had 
time only to scratch your initials on the fly-leaf 
of a copy, and forgot to leave your address behind ; 
nevertheless, the little book (of which I suspect 
you heartily disapprove, for reasons) will reach 
you in due course. 

Always yours, 

W. V. M. 



146 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

Kansas City, Mo. 
March 29, 1904. 
Dear Dan: 

I am a thousand times obliged for your friendly- 
offices in negotiating the lease and sending on my 
stuff. After I wrote I became conscience-stricken 
over the magnitude of the trouble I had put you 
to ; but the chance I had for going to Arizona and 
seeing some aboriginal life was exceptional, and I 
could not afford to go on to New York to make the 
arrangements myself ; at least to do so would have 
so seriously depleted my funds that I should prob- 
ably have had to abandon the western trip after 
said arrangements had been made. I do not see 
what you get out of it except the good man*s 
ancient reward (too much relied upon by putters 
of others to trouble) and the satisfaction of having 

near at hand and in pleasant quarters. I have 

written urging him to occupy the room, and told 
him to apply to you for the key to the bureau. . . . 
My book^ turned up (advanced copies) just as I 
was leaving the house to take the western train; 
I had time to put your initials on a fly-leaf, and 

1 "The Fire-Bringer." 



SOME LETTERS OF 

M. L. M's on another, and they ought to reach 
you in a day or two. I shall drop you a line now 
and then from the shadow of a giant-cactus or 
from the top of a Zuni pueblo. 

Ever yours, 

W. V. M. 
P.S. No, Chicago has not been chucked, merely 
happily relegated to the future. 

To Percy MacKaye 

2970 Groveland Ave., 
Chicago, Aug. 5, 1904. 
My dear Mr. MacKaye, 

Let me thank you very heartily for your 
generous words concerning "The Fire-Bringer." 
Such words would be very pleasant to hear from 
any one, and they are trebly so when that one is a 
fellow-workman in the poetic drama. It is true, 
as Mr. Shipman has told you, that I am heart 
and soul dedicated to the conviction that modern 
life can be presented on the stage in the poetic 
mediums, and adequately presented only in that 
way. If I am anywhere near Cornish this summer, 
as is not improbable, it will give me genuine 
pleasure to look you up. In any case you will find 
me from the first of November on, at 51 West loth 

148 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

Street, New York; and I hope that you will come 
to see me there. With thanks and good wishes, 
I am Earnestly yours 

Wm. Vaughn Moody. 

Percy MacKaye Esq. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

51 West loth St. 
New York, Oct. 8, 1904. 
Dear Dan: 

I got your quotation about St. L6 and the Val 
de Vire, and was delighted with it, as I should 
have assured you if you had given me an address. 
By the way, I have put "Old Pourquoi" (do you 
remember?) into a poem, which I think will 
amuse you. 

W. V. M. 

To Edmund Clarence Stedman 

2970 Groveland Ave. 
CmcAGo, Jan. 12, 1905. 

My dear Mr. Stedman: 

Your letter has followed me deviously through 
the south and north again, with its most friendly 

149 



SOME LETTERS OF 

message. That you should have taken the trouble 
to write me at such length and with your own 
hand gives double worth to the news of my nomi- 
nation for membership in the Institute. As for 
this latter let me say at once that I am grateful 
to you for proposing my name, and if elected shall 
accept the honor gladly. Your generous words 
concerning my ''Fire-Bringer" have given me 
great joy. The poem got little praise, and that 
little mostly misdirected, so that I had come to 
think of it, as — so far as my hoped-for audience 
was concerned — a failure. But if you like it, it is 
no failure, and I can go on with a good heart. It is 
a vast pity you did not carry out your intention 
of treating the theme yourself. It takes some gen- 
erosity to feel so, since your poem would have 
rendered mine superfluous, if not impertinence. 
But I am at bottom more jealous for Poetry, and 
especially for the poetry which shall be named and 
recognized as in a large sense American, than I am 
for my own poems, though jealous enough for 
them, Heaven knows, according to the flesh! Your 
beautiful Alectry6n, taken in connection with 
what you tell me of your thwarted intention, 
shows how parlously near I came to having my 
theme ^^ assumed" into a heaven of invention 

150 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

where I should neither have dared nor wished to 
pursue it. You have my — so to speak — ''post 
humorous " gratitude, with the reservation named. 
I am particularly glad that you do not share the 
current prejudice against such subjects, in favor 
of a literary Americanism which I, for my own 
part, cannot but deem false in theory and barren 
in practice. . . . Believe me, Faithfully yours, 
William Vaughn Moody. 

The studio at 51 West loth St., occupied by a friend 
during the Arizona trip, made a convenient New York 
headquarters, which Moody retained for some time. 
He was back there in the fall of 1904, and through the 
following spring. His work was now eagerly sought 
by some of the magazines, and one of the pleasantest 
friendships of this time was that with Richard Watson 
Gilder of the Century. Mr. Gilder's poem, referred to 
in the letters, was printed in the Atlantic Monthly for 
June, 1905, under the title, "A New Poet." 

A NEW POET 

BY R. W. GILDER 

I 

Friends, beware! 

Stop babbling! Hark, a sound is in the air! 

Above the pretty songs of schools 

(Not of music made, but rules), 

151 



SOME LETTERS OF 

Above the panic rush for gold 

And emptinesses manifold, 

And selling of the soul for phantom fame, 

And reek of praises where there should be blame ; 

Over the dust and muck, 

The buzz and roar of wheels, 

Another music steals, — 

A right, true note is struck. 

n 

Friends, beware! 

A sound of singing in the air! 

The love song of a man who loves his fellow men ; 

Mother-love and country-love, and the love of sea 

and fen; 
Lovely thoughts and mighty thoughts and thoughts 

that linger long; 
There has come to the old world's singing the thrill 

of a brave new song. 



Ill 

They said there were no more singers, 
But listen ! — A master voice ! 
A voice of the true joy-bringers! 
Now will ye heed and rejoice. 
Or pass on the other side. 
And wait till the singer hath died, 
Then weep o'er his voiceless clay? 
Friends, beware! 

1S2 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

A keen, new sound is in the air, — 
Know ye a poet's coming is the old world's judg- 
ment day! 

To Richard Watson Gilder 

51 West ioth St. 
New York, April 17 [1905]. 
Dear Mr. Gilder, 

At the risk of seeming ungracious, and insensi- 
ble of the honor which you have planned to do 
me, I am going to ask you to publish the poem in 
the Atlantic without my initials. I do so because 
of no boyish mock-modesty, but because I know 
in the bottom of my heart that I have not yet 
reached a point in the practice of our divine art 
which entitles me to this sort of public recogni- 
tion from a man like you. Even if you are ardently 
and generously minded enough to think other- 
wise, I beg that you will yield to my own deep 
feeling in the matter, which I express only after 
long thought. Try to ascribe my rejection of the 
offered honor to a sentiment no less magnanimous 
than was the one which prompted you to extend 
it, and believe me 

Always faithfully yours, 

Wm. Vaughn Moody. 
153 



SOME LETTERS OF 

To Richard Watson Gilder 

51 West ioth St. 
New York, April 19th. 
Dear Mr. Gilder, 

I am grateful to you for acceding to my request 
about the initials, and for understanding my 
motive. I am also much obliged to you for the 
sight of your letter to Traubel about the Whit- 
man letters. Whitman did himself sore wrong 
in many of his judgments — but for the matter of 
that so do we all. It is good to rise above personal 
injustice as you do in your lines written for the 
dinner, which I return (together with the letter) 
with thanks for the privilege of seeing them. 



To Richard Watson Gilder 

51 West ioth St. 
New York, Thursday. 
Dear Mr. Gilder, 

The poem made me very proud and happy, 
and I shall preserve it among my most cherished 
possessions, both for its generous personal praise 
and for its intrinsic beauty. I have made the 
correction of which you speak. 



154 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

To Richard Watson Gilder 

[Posted April 27, 1905.] 
Dear Mr. Gilder: 

I scribble this lying on my back in the hospital, 
where on Friday last I underwent an operation 
which proved rather serious. I did not tell you 
about it and do not send you the address now 
because I know that your native kindness would 
lead you to take all sorts of trouble about it, and 
my own instinct is just to lie low and not peep 
until nature restores me again to an upright 
posture and the self-respect thereunto appertain- 
ing. I am well looked after, and getting along 
capitally under the circumstances. I started this 
note to thank you for letting me see Robinson's 
note, and to say that I would send you a poem or 
two for inspection when I get up again. 

I know you must be terribly cut up over 
Jefferson's death. Yours, 

W. V. M. 

To Edwin Arlington Robinson 

33 East 33RD St., 
New York, May 10 [1905]. 
Dear Robinson, 

Your note of inquiry and expostulation reached 

155 



SOME LETTERS OF 

me some days ago, but I have hardly been up to 
writing before today. I am happy to report that 
the operation which I underwent three weeks ago 
has succeeded admirably, and I shall soon be on 
my feet again — at least on one of them and a 
cane or two. For the first few days after they 
sliced me I had a squeak for it ; temperature any- 
thing in the shade and pulse hopping like a jack- 
rabbit who descries Teddy on the horizon. How- 
ever, Nature soon decided that I was of more 
use to her in an organized state than as phos- 
phates, and since then I have made a rapid recov- 
ery. . . . 

To Richard Watson Gilder 

51 West ioth St. 
May 13th, 1905. 
Dear Mr. Gilder, 

Yes, I am out of the hospital, thank God, owing 
to my flat refusal to endure any longer the hideous 
monotony of blank walls and blank hours (the 
latter my own fault, I know), but I am not yet 
very much master of my machine — only able to 
hobble tentatively about on one leg and a cane or 
two. 



156 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

I do not want to go away for the summer with- 
out seeing you again, for who knows where either 
of us will be by the time the leaves fall? If you 
wish, I will bring a few verses to read, but I do 
not think that I have anything suitable for the 
magazine. If I am to do this I must read them to 
you solus (this you will grant to my constitutional 
fear of an ''audience"). 

Thanks for St. Gaudens' note. It is pleasant 
to possess anything from the hand of that noble 
artist. 

Faithfully yours, 

Wm. Vaughn Moody. 

Mrs. Gilder puts me under another debt by a 
second jar of that delectable coagulation. 

W. V. M. 

To Mary L, Mason 

51 West ioth St. 
Monday. [Postmark, June 5, 1905.] 
Dear Mary Mason, 

Though I must sorrowfully confess to having 
been ''beguiled" by no dames, yet so beguiling a 
note as yours of this morning is a sufficient recom- 
pense. My sister has watched over me with so 
hawklike an eye, to prevent me from over- 

157 



SOME LETTERS OF 

exerting my lame leg, that I have not been able 
to escape as far as your house. This week I shall 
make another and more desperate attempt to run 
the blockade, and in case of success shall drop in 
upon you some evening to swap operation-stories. 
. . . You must not look to find me the picture of 
grace — the pardlike spirit beautiful and swift — 
that I once was. . . . 

W. V. M. 

To Richard Watson Gilder 

2970 Groveland Ave., 
Chicago, III., Aug. 23, '05. 
Dear Mr. Gilder, 

The account of ** housework" in your country, 
and especially your contribution to the cere- 
monies, gave me the keenest pleasure. I am an 
ancient and — as I thought — irreconcilable 
enemy of the Whitmanic verse-mode, but your 
handling of it goes far to prove me wrong and 
baptize me into the new dispensation. The 
bee-filled linden-tree, "humming . . . like the 
plucked string of a violin," is unforgettably good. 
As regards the "Second Coming" I would say to 
the possible illustrator that the caulking-man was 
a strong, sensual-looking young Greek of the 

158 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

island type, naked to the waist, with cropped 
hair and bare feet; the person speaking to him 
was curiously spiritual in feature, slightly bearded, 
bare-headed, dressed in the long flowing gown of 
the Greek priesthood, rusty black in tone. He 
looked like an Armenian. I will try to clarify the 
"watery death" stanza, either by distillation or 
plain sopping up. 

The President's Outlook article was undeniably 
kind in intention and will doubtless do Robinson 
much worldly good. As for its substance, since 
we have adopted the absolute despotic form of 
government I deem it best that such treasonable 
matter as criticism of the imperial utterances, 
even on such a trifling subject as poetry, be not 
committed to ink. I have no taste for labor in the 
mines of Siberia — I mean Alaska — with a ball 
and chain on my left leg. 

Various circumstances make it difficult for me 
to go East as I had intended, but I may go on 
later. If so I shall surely give myself the pleasure 
of seeing you at Four Brooks. Sincerely yours, 

Wm. Vaughn Moody. 

"The President's Outlook article" was a very com- 
plimentary review by Colonel Roosevelt of Mr. Edwin 
Arlington Robinson's "Captain Craig." 

159 



SOME LETTERS OF 

Early in 1906 Moody finished his prose play, "The 
Great Divide," which received some trial performances 
that spring in Chicago under the title "A Sabine 
Woman," and was regularly put on the stage the fol- 
lowing fall, in New York, by Miss Margaret Anglin 
and Mr. Henry Miller. The opening night was 
October 4th. 

To Richard Watson Gilder 

51 West ioth St. 
New York, Feb. 5 [1906]. 
Dear Mr. Gilder, 

I do not know what the scope or function of the 
MacDowell Club is, so that I cannot tell whether 
my new play ["The Great Divide"] would be 
suitable for its stage or not. I am anxious to get 
it produced on the professional stage, by a pro- 
fessional troupe. Miss Marlowe and Sothern, 
however, I am sure would not cotton to it, as it is 
'* realism" of a rather grim and uncompromising 
type, without the romantic glamor which they 
affect — at least what romantic glamor there is 
is implicit and present only to the probing eye of 
the elect. I should very much like to get Henry 
Miller to take it, but I guess that is out of the 
question. The "Fire-Bringer" — if all plans go 
through — is to be produced next winter in 

160 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

Chicago, in a new theatre which is being started 
there. 



To Percy MacKaye 

Hotel Seville, New York City» 
Oct. II, 1906. 
Dear Percy, 

Thanks for your cordial note about the play. 
Broadway the formidable has indeed roared us as 
any sucking dove, for this once. It*s like taking 
candy from a child. I am making my plans to get 
down to Philadelphia for your opening. Save me 
a ticket, and I shall come if it 's a possible thing. 

Faithfully yours. 

Will. 

To Daniel Gregory Mason 

[New York.] 
Oct. 12, 1906. 
Dear Dan, 

I had tickets in my pocket for you and Mary, 
for the opening night of the play, and hoped you 
would turn up to use them. When you did n't 
I consoled myself with the reflection that, in case 
the thing was a failure, you would be spared pain, 
and I also, by your absence. When, at the end of 

161 



SOME LETTERS OF 

the first act, it looked like a go, and still more 
when, after the second, the audience rose like a 
sea in a storm and thundered its approval, my 
regrets returned manifold. Let me know when you 
are coming in, that I may secure tickets for you : 
the house is selling out now several days ahead, 
and we are turning hundreds of people away 
every night. Hooray! 

I want very much to come out to Washington* 
for a day or two next week. ... Be prepared to 
show me some nice hill-farms, which can be 
bought for a little money. I am looking for one. 

Yours, 

W. V. M. 

In the spring of 1908, while living in rooms he had 
taken at 107 Waverly Place, New York, Moody was 
prostrated by a severe and prolonged attack of typhoid 
fever, from which his health never completely recov- 
ered. His hitherto stalwart constitution seemed broken 
and all work was hampered by a languor peculiarly 
hard for his active nature to endure. He was devotedly 
nursed by his friend of many years standing, Mrs. 
Harriet Brainerd, of Chicago, whom he married in 
1909. The chief literary work of this time of broken 
health was the revision of "The Faith-Healer" for 
performance in January, 1910, and the drafting of the 
^ Washington, Connecticut. 
162 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

first act of "The Death of Eve," intended to complete 
the trilogy of poetic dramas, but never finished. He 
died October 17, 1910, at Colorado Springs. 

To Henry Miller 

Hotel Pontchartrain. 
Detroit, Jan. 23rd, 1909. 
My dear Mr. Miller, 

I saw the performance ["The Great Divide"] 
this afternoon for the first time in many months, 
and I am forced to protest against the way in 
which the character of Philip has been gradually, 
but at last in the end totally, changed, both in 
spirit and significance. It is now played as a 
comedy part, and the whole effort is spent upon 
the attempt to wring the words and action, willy- 
nilly, into the guise of comic relief. I need hardly 
point out to you that this is to deprive the play 
of an essential element and to very seriously 
damage it thereby. 

I make this statement with extreme unwilling- 
ness, but I feel that I must do so both in fairness 
to myself and in the interest of the play's future 
integrity. 

Believe me. Very sincerely yours, 

Wm. Vaughn Moody. 

163 



SOME LETTERS OF 



To Henry Miller 

2970 Groveland Ave. 

Chicago, Jan. 29, '09. 
Dear Mr. Miller, 

I have not written before about the proposed 
change in the first act of the Great Divide, first 
because I have been again in bad health, but 
chiefly because I wanted to think it over from 
every point of view and see if it would ''hold 
water" everywhere. I am now convinced, for my 
own part, that it is all right. The change is so 
slight and obvious a one that you will probably 
be skeptical at first of its efficacy, and in any case 
you will be surprised that it has not hitherto 
occurred to us. It is, in a word, simply to omit 
from the first act all mention of marriage. Ruth 
says merely "Save me, and I will make it up to 
you" (of course the dialogue here will have to be 
somewhat changed, but remains in substance the 
same, with the exception noted). She does not 
read the letter out, and its contents do not emerge 
until the second act. He speaks of reaching San 
Jacinto before daylight, but there is no mention 
of marriage there, although by this time and in 
the dialogue which follows it becomes clear (with- 

r64 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

out any overt expression at all, and without any 
change) that marriage is in his mind. He reads 
(to himself) the note which she leaves for her 
brother, and it is here that the idea of marriage 
begins to take firm shape in his mind, but I do 
not think that the subject ought to be discussed 
or even broached between them. In the second 
act it is made clear that they were married on the 
very night of the attack, at San Jacinto, and the 
rest of the play goes on without change. What do 
you think? I have rewritten the first act on these 
lines, have criticivsed the result from every stand- 
point, and I firmly believe that the vexatious and 
long-standing problem is solved at last. 

I have also made some verbal changes (chiefly 
omissions) in both the first and second acts, the 
reasons for which I will explain at length when I 
see you. I shall also tighten up the encounter 
between Ghent and Philip in Act iii, so as to 
make of it a real menace on the brother's part. 

I am unable to send you the revised manu- 
script at this moment, as I was forced by certain 
sudden complications in the matter of printing 
the book to send on the only copy I had to 
Houghton, Mifflin. This will be returned to me 
soon, when I shall forward it promptly to you. I 

165 



SOME LETTERS OF 

have also been too ill to get in shape the detailed 
criticisms of the acting which I jotted down in 
Detroit, but as the company is to be practically 
re-made for England perhaps there is nothing to 
be gained by badgering the present actors with 
minute criticism. What do you think? 

My doctor threatens, if I don't do better, to 
ship me off to Southern California. I hope this 
won't be necessary, or if necessary that I can get 
back in due season to watch the rehearsals of the 
Faith-Healer. Sincerely yours, 

W. V. Moody. 

To Henry Miller 

2970 Groveland Ave. 
Chicago, Feb. ist, '09. 
Dear Mr. Miller, 

I have been doing very badly in health of late 
and am under doctor's orders to go to Southern 
California at once, on pain of a breakdown. This 
is very annoying to me, as I fear it will be also to 
you, but there is no getting round it. I have given 
orders to Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 4 Park St., Bos- 
ton, to forward to your New York office promptly 
the proof-sheets of ''The Great Divide," which 
will place before you my mature ideas concerning 

166 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

the changes already mentioned to you. Of course 
you are under no obligation to adopt them, but I 
hope that before rejecting any of them in favor of 
the old version you will give each change or omis- 
sion your serious consideration. The slight (but I 
think important) changes in the second act are in 
the direction of softening the harsh asperity of 
Ruth's tone; also in one case (the omission of the 
lines : "Funny, ain't it — Well, I take my punish- 
ment" etc. "What are these papers?" "Plans 
for a sheep-corral ") to soften the harshness of 
Ghent's tone, which I think at this point grates on 
the nerves unduly. In the third act the only change 
of any importance is in the scene between Philip and 
Ghent, where I have tried to put some real menace 
into Philip's attack. If the stage directions are 
followed here, I feel sure the scene — and thereby 
the whole act — will be greatly strengthened. 

Please, please persuade whoever plays Ruth in 
London to put love into Act ii. Miss Lawton 
plays it without one hint of tenderness and 
smothered affection (or rather affection battling 
with pride), and in consequence her yielding to 
Ghent at the close of the play seems unconvincing 
— a mere theatrical forced note for the "happy 
ending," instead of seeming, as it really is, the 

167 



SOME LETTERS OF 

final releasing of the flood-gates of her love. This 
is really, as you feel as strongly as I do, the 
master-note of the play. It has never been truly 
rendered, and at present it is not even suggested. 
This may sound like harsh criticism, but it is 
nevertheless gospel truth. 

One thing more. I beg you to reconsider the 
stage business at the very close of Act i (I mean 
where Ghent raises his hand and points, and 
Ruth goes past him cringing with bent head). 
This seems to me melodramatic and false in its 
effect — it is quite out of key with Ghent's simple, 
straightforward, unmelodramatic character, and 
also with the girl's corresponding qualities. Please 
think of this. Also, I think the expression of Ghent's 
sorrow at the close of Act ii is now over-done. 

I think that his bursting into violent and 
audible grief alienates rather than wins the sym- 
pathy of the audience. You will forgive me for 
these frank criticisms. You asked me for them. 

I am sorry to inflict so long a letter upon you, 
but as my future is uncertain in the matter of 
health and whereabouts, I felt impelled to set 
these things down. Any word you can send me to 
my Los Angeles address, will be gratefully received ; 

1 68 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

I am anxious to keep in touch with your plans. 
Sincerely yours, 

Wm. Vaughn Moody. 

To Mrs. C. H. Toy 

107 Waverly Place, 
New York, Feb. 17 [1909.] 
Dear Mrs. Toy, 

. . . The new play [**The Faith-Healer"], of 
which you say you have heard, is a queerish thing, 
at the antipodes from this one ["The Great 
Divide"] in method and feeling. . . . 

The thing I have most at heart just now is a 
poetic — I mean a verse — play. I have got a 
grand idea, and keep feeling my muscle to see if I 
am up to doing it, thus far with rather discourag- 
ing responses from my system. Also, I am torn 
between the ideal aspect of the theme and the 
stage necessities — the old, old problem. Per- 
haps in the end I will let the stage go to ballyhoo, 
and write the thing as I see it, for that justly 
lighted and managed stage of the mind, where 
there are no bad actors and where the peanut- 
eating of the public is reduced to a discreet mini- 
mum. But this — after all — is an uncourageous 
compromise. . . . 

169 



SOME LETTERS OF 

[To Henry Miller] 

Messrs. Brown, Shipley & Co.*s 

Travellers' Office. 
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W. 
July 10, '09. 
Dear Miller, 

Your friendly telegram, letting me know the 
date of your arrival in London and inviting me 
to be present at the opening of the Divide, reached 
me yesterday. I have been meaning to write to 
you, to tell you how good the prospect looks to 
me here for the play, also to apologize to you for 
keeping mum at Sky Meadows this spring con- 
cerning my prospective marriage. The reason for 
my keeping quiet was — of course — my desire 
to prevent any inkling of the event from reaching 
the newspapers before we were safely on ship- 
board. Not that you would not have been discre- 
tion itself but one is always nervous in these 
matters. As it turned out, our precautions seem 
to have proved excessive, with the result that my 
mail swarms with inquiry from anxious friends. 
Cards of announcement after the fact are printed, 
and will I hope soon comfort these troubled 
breasts. 

As to your invitation to be present at the open- 
170 



WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 

ing of the play, it greatly tempts me, and perhaps 
my desires will prevail over my prudence; but 
the fact is that my health has been and is wretched, 
and the doctors warn me that if I do not take 
great care just now I will rue it. The work which 
I did on the Faith-Healer, together with the 
excitement attending its production, came too 
soon after my typhoid convalescence. In conse- 
quence I broke down badly after reaching 
London, and have been extremely ill since, with 
symptoms of typhoid relapse well known to the 
doctors and very grimly regarded by them. Now 
I am better, and gaining steadily, but the wise- 
acres say that the only place for me — for a year 
— is a farm, and that any excitement which I 
allow myself is at my peril. Anyhow, I shall be 
here in spirit, and I cannot help feeling that the 
prospect for a substantial success is good, in fact 
excellent. . . . 

With earnest good wishes, I am 

Sincerely yours, 

W. V. Moody. 



THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



OCT ]3 1913 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

015 973 493 6 



